He has a multidisciplinary background, receiving a PhD from the Computation and Neural Systems department at Caltech, followed by a three-year postdoc in the Center for Microbial Ecology at MSU with evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski. He is currently the director of the MSU Digital Evolution Laboratory and the deputy director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, a new multi-university NSF Science and Technology Center. His research uses digital organisms to answer fundamental questions in evolutionary biology and harness the results to solve more applied, computational problems.