He is currently professor and university chairman of the department of physiology and biophysics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
from Bowdoin College and received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Princeton University.
After holding a position as research associate in the physics department at the University of Southern California, studying with Sergio Porto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1969.
In the 1970s, he used infrared spectroscopy to demonstrate that what was thought to be a newly discovered form of water, polywater, was structurally similar to human sweat.
He is also a pioneer in using resonance Raman spectroscopy to study heme proteins, notably hemoglobin, cytochrome c oxidase, nitric oxide synthase, and the folding of cytochrome c.