Dan received his B.S in applied physicist and electrical engineering from Yale University in 2008. He then joined the lab of Prof. Harry Atwater at Caltech for his Ph.D. in applied physics. During his Ph.D., Dan became fascinated by the brain. After he defended in 2013, Dan decided to turn his fascination into his career. He moved to the HHMI Janelia Research Campus for postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Vivek Jayaraman. At Janelia, Dan studied a neural circuit that gives animals their sense of direction. He identified all of the neurons involved in the circuit and characterized the functional roles of many of them. Dan now continues to develop and apply approaches to characterize the computational units of the brain at the University of California, Santa Cruz.