I grew up in Palo Alto, California. When I was about five years old, I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos on laser disc (!), which inspired a lifelong passion for science and astronomy. For Halloween in 1995, I went trick-or-treating as Tycho Brahe, the badass Danish astronomer with a golden nose. Around the same time, the Mayor and Marcy groups were beginning to find planets around other Suns and the field of exoplanet astronomy took off.

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I studied physics and astronomy as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley living at the International House, among other places. I graduated in 2010 and moved to San Francisco, but I returned to Berkeley as a graduate student that same year and began working on my PhD under the guidance of Geoff Marcy. My thesis focused on measuring the prevalence of planets as small as Earth using NASA's Kepler mission. This work helped to constrain the frequency of planets similar to Earth in size and temperature. From 2013 to 2014, I had the wonderful opportunity to work at the University of Hawaii with Andrew Howard (now at Caltech). In Hawaii, I grew to love surfing, poke, and Jawaiian music.

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After completing my PhD in 2015, I moved to Los Feliz, a hipster neighborhood of Los Angeles in the shadow of Griffith Observatory and was a Hubble Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. In 2019, I joined the faculty at UCLA, moved to Culver City, and became a dad. In my free time, I like to bike, skate the streets of LA, cook, and go camping with my family. I also play in a band called the Seventh Season with Konstantin Batygin and Jon Zink.​