Ben earned his B.S. in Biological Sciences at Stanford University and then continued on there as a technician in the lab of Dr. David Kingsley. Ben received his Ph.D. in 2009 from Indiana University, Bloomington, where he worked with with Drs. Loren Rieseberg and Scott Michaels, and he completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology at Duke University and University of California, Berkeley with Drs. John Willis and Daniel Rokhsar, respectively. Ben served as a faculty member in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia for seven semesters before starting his current position at UC Berkeley in January 2016. Over this period, Ben has been a highly productive researcher, authoring over 25 publications, and he also has an impressive record of fellowship and grant support from the National Science foundation.