He has two PhD’s. He received his first PhD in molecular biology from UC Berkeley in 1994, where he studied in bacterial signaling pathways. He was a postdoc studying RNA enzyme evolution at Max Planck Institute in Germany. He received his second PhD in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz in 2004, where he studied phonology as a dynamical system. He has been a professor at University of Arizona since 2004. He studies hypotheses deriving from the model of language as a dynamical system, making use of computational simulation, corpus studies and laboratory studies.