In 2010, he obtained a doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University. After his Ph.D., he worked in the Lane Center at Carnegie Mellon University as a Lane Postdoctoral Fellow. During this time, he established a multi-scale method to construct artificial cells. He has published his work in journals such as Nature Chemical Biology, Molecular Systems Biology, and Nature Nanotechnology. He has received several awards, including the Medtronic Fellowship, the Lane Fellowship, the Society-in-Science: Branco Weiss Fellowship, and a young investigator grant from the Human Frontier Science Program. His research group at University of California Davis is interested in the engineering of synthetic biological systems for therapeutic treatment, with a particular focus on resistant bacteria and microbiota.