His lab studies the effect of genetic variations on the development in the brain, with specific applications in autism and language impairment. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in biological engineering at Utah State University before earning his PhD in computational biology at the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany in 2010. After his time in Germany, he joined the lab of noted psychiatric geneticist Jonathan Sebat at UC San Diego, where he completed his postdoctoral training and published several important papers dealing with genome informatics and the genetics of autism. In 2013, he joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, and his current research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.