He completed his Ph.D. in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2004 and was as a post-doctoral research fellow at both the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and the Harvard Initiative for Global Health. His primary research focus is on Africa, the African Diaspora, and racial inequality in the U.S. and South Africa. He is currently working on two major projects. The first examines the language and schooling outcomes of the children of Africans in the U.S. and is funded through a Presidential Authority Award from the Russell Sage Foundation. The second focuses on the dynamics of poverty among the children of Black immigrants in the U.S., and is funded through a Young Investigator Development Grant from the Center for Poverty Research of the University of Kentucky.