He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His research focuses on making inferences from human skeletal remains. Current interests include cranial and postcranial evolution of Neanderthals and modern humans, understanding present-day human cranial diversity, and sub-adult age estimation from the postcranial skeleton. He uses a variety of approaches, including 3D geometric morphometrics, interactive computer visualization, biomechanics, and theoretical models from quantitative and population genetics.