He received his PhD in anthropology from Princeton University in 2006, and from 2007 to 2010 held a postdoctoral fellowship in the CIHR Strategic Training Program in Culture and Mental Health Services Research in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. His research interests include the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; culture and mental health; addiction and its treatment; as well as the embodied and symbolic grounds of healing and clinical efficacy. He is currently completing a book—Governing Habits: Addiction and the Therapeutic Market in Contemporary Russia—which examines the political-economic, epidemiological and clinical changes that have transformed the knowledge and medical management of alcoholism and addiction in Russia over the past twenty years.