Ben received his B.S. in Health Sciences from UC Santa Cruz in 2009. After graduating, he joined the lab of Fred H. Gage at the Salk Institute and developed cell culture models of Parkinson's disease (PD) using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and dopaminergic neurons generated from patient tissue. Ben joined the Weill Cornell Neuroscience Graduate Program in 2013 and works in the lab of Gregory A. Petsko, where he is engineering novel fluorescent biosensors to study the sources of oxidative stress and neuroinflammation in PD pathology. Understanding normal and pathological behavior of the brain's immune cells may provide unique insight into mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases.