He earned his Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Missouri working with Carl Gerhardt on acoustic communication in frogs. He was a postdoc from 2001 to 2005 at the University Oldenburg, where he worked with Georg Klump on the neural mechanisms of auditory processing in songbirds. His research program investigates the mechanisms, functions, and evolution of hearing and sound communication in nonhuman animals. a major objective of his research is to discover the signal processing that require extracting biologically critical information from vocal signals under the adverse listening conditions found in noisy social environments.