He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006. His research areas are formal syntax and semantics, lexical semantics, and linguistic typology. He is primarily interested the nature of word meanings, including how word meanings are decomposed into more basic semantic primitives, how these primitives are interpreted truth conditionally, and how a word’s meaning correlates with and ultimately determines its grammatical behavior. He has a specific focus on verbal semantics and the linguistic representation of events, with ongoing projects on argument realization, lexical aspect, affectedness and result encoding, the relationship of regular and idiosyncratic meaning in a verb's semantics, and the encoding of motion events, including studies on English, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish, and Colloquial Sinhala.