As an undergraduate he studied Physics and Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where he had the opportunity to experience lab research under the mentorship of Stas Shvartsman, who introduced him to his abiding interest in quantitative imaging and animal development. He conducted his Ph.D. research under the guidance of Michael Levine at UC Berkeley, where he studied cis-regulatory sequences that modulate the precision and robustness of gene expression (in particular shadow enhancers and paused promoters). As a postdoc in Xiaowei Zhuang's single-molecule imaging group at Harvard University, he studied gene regulation through super-resolution microscopy, multiplexed, error-correcting imaging, and deep sequencing. Dr. Boettiger started his lab at Stanford in 2016.