He received his PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford in 2008, working primarily with Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. He recently completed a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Waterloo with Steve Spencer. His research is primarily focused on how people manage and defend their self-image in the face of threats, and how this affects their beliefs and behavior. He also explores how social contexts and psychological processes can either exacerbate threats to self-image or attenuate them. He writes: