He attended Montana State University where he received his PhD in Plant Genetics with an emphasis on the application of genomic-assisted breeding for the development of superior malting barley varieties for agricultural production. Upon completion of his PhD, he joined the lab of Dr. Michael Gore at Cornell University where his work centered on the use of field-based, high-throughput phenotyping technologies to investigate stress adaptive traits in cotton as well as the temporal dynamics of QTL expression. His future research is aimed at continued development and application of field-deployable technologies to better understand the physiological response of plants to adverse environmental conditions.