He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science under Rob Knight and Mike Mozer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a certificate in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology from the University of Colorado's BioFrontiers Institute. He came to the University of Minnesota from a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Ramnik Xavier at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His lab studies the human-associated microbial communities (microbiomes) using tools from bioinformatics and machine learning.