He began his academic career with an undergraduate degree in Physics and studied nuclear physics. From there, he transitioned to complete his PhD in Molecular Biophysics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Before coming to the University of Arizona, he performed his post-doctoral studies at the University of Colorado under the RNA biochemist and Nobel laureate Tom Cech. His new lab studies two diseases: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, a neurodegenerative disease, and Ewing’s sarcoma, a pediatric bone cancer. These seemingly unrelated diseases share a common molecular basis in pathology involving proteins that adopt unconventional and disordered structures.