Before Stanford, he earned his Ph.D. at the MIT Sloan School of Management. While an undergraduate at Duke he cofounded Sun Dance Genetics, and won their business plan competition with a biotech corn start-up, listed on Fortune small business. Since then he has worked in a Duke neuroscience lab, started a biotech consulting firm, worked with numerous pharmaceutical companies and two venture capital firms and mentored startups in the MIT 100K and Clean Energy competitions. His research appears in Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy and the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. Prior to MIT, he worked at the Duke University Medical Center, publishing in medical journals and in textbooks on cognition in schizophrenia.