I received my BS in Biology in 1999 from the University of Michigan. After a 5-year stint in industry at The Dow Chemical Company - where I fell in love with research and my wife Heidi (now of 18 years) - we moved ourselves and 6-week old daughter from Midland, Michigan to Durham, North Carolina and I started graduate school at Duke University. There I trained with Dr. Blanche Capel studying the complex genetics of primary sex determination, and in the process fell in love again, this time with big data and the emerging field of systems genetics. After graduating with my PhD in Genetics from Duke in 2010, and lacking any training in bioinformatics or statistical genetics, I moved my family again up to an island in Maine to work with Dr. Gary Churchill at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX). There I became immersed in an interdisciplinary group developing methods to extract a new understanding of gene regulation using large transcriptomic and proteomic datasets from a genetically diverse mouse mapping population, the Diversity Outbred (DO) heterogeneous stock. I was given the opportunity to start my own research group at JAX in the summer of 2015, and I seek to apply similar systems genetic approaches to dissect gene network regulation during normal development and malfunctions that drive disorder and disease. When I'm not trying to solve genetic puzzles, I like to solve crossword puzzles, cook, argue with anonymous people online about politics, and play golf.