He earned a BS in Physics from Michigan Technological University in 1999 and completed his PhD in Optical Sciences with Michael Descour at the University of Arizona in 2006 developing micro-optics technology and instrumentation for endomicroscopy. From 2007 to 2013, he worked with Vadim Backman at Northwestern University in developing light scattering methods to quantify nanoscale structure for detection of Field Carcinogenesis. He joined the BME faculty at UW-Madison in 2013, where his Biomedical Optics and Biophotonics research group develops optical methods, instrumentation, and computational models to enable quantification of nanoscale tissue structure, and scattering-based quantification and image contrast for retinal imaging and disease screening.