He graduated from Swarthmore College in 2002 with majors in Physics and Computer Science, and earned his Ph.D. (in Physics) in 2006 from Cornell University, where he worked with Eberhard Bodenschatz. He held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in 2006 (with Eberhard Bodenschatz) and in the Physics Department at Haverford College from 2007-2008 (with Jerry Gollub). Prior to working at Stanford, he spent seven years on the faculty in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University.