He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2011, specializing in semantics and pragmatics. Empirically, he explores these issues in part through primary fieldwork on understudied languages, including Yucatec Maya (a Mayan language spoken throughout the Yucatán peninsula) and Tagalog (an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines). He is also leading a project with Wilson Silva documenting A'ingae (Kofán, Cofán).