He holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and completed the PhD with distinction in the Joint Degree Program of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 2007. His dissertation research involved Fulbright-Hays funded fieldwork with Wauja people, a group of roughly 350 speakers of an Arawak language from the Upper Xingu of Brazil. He was McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College, Smeall Summer Scholar of Anthropological Linguistics at the School for Advanced Research, and Assistant Professor at MacEwan University before going to Notre Dame in 2013.