I was born in Montreal, Canada. I obtained my PhD in Biological Structure at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1998, where my thesis focused on protein folding and molecular chaperones.
Subsequently I moved to Martinsried, Germany where I was a post-doctoral fellow with Ulrich Hartl at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. In the Hartl lab I began to characterize the role of molecular chaperones in Huntington's disease and developed a yeast model to study polyglutamine aggregation. I next returned to Seattle for a second post-doctoral stint with Stanley Fields in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. My research in the Fields' lab was centered on understanding basic cellular mechanisms that regulate polyglutamine aggregation.
In 2001, I was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology, also at the University of Washington. In 2005, I moved my laboratory to the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, where I was appointed as an Associate Investigator. I also hold an appointment as an Associate Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Neurology, at the University of California, San Francisco.