Max is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at SUNY Albany. He was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, where he studied biology and math. He did his PhD at the University of Washington, under the mentorship of Fred Rieke, where he fell in love with vision and the seemingly impossible task of understanding the neural basis of vision in the real world. He then did a postdoc with Tom Clandinin at Stanford, where he fell in love with fruit flies and lasers. In his free time, Max likes to go on bike rides, do crossword puzzles, and hang out with his wife, Sarah and their daughter, Mollie.