He received his doctorate from Vanderbilt University in 2004 and completed at post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Systems Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital from 2007-2010. He has co-authored >32 high- impact articles and was awarded a NIH pathway to Independence Grant (K99R00) from NHLBI before coming to Auburn. His research focus is to better understand how certain bacteria are able to cause human disease and in turn use this knowledge against the microbe to detect specific sites of infections and identify casual pathogen.