[1] He has served as the Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania since 2014.
He is also the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
[3] He went on to Harvard University for graduate school where he received his PhD with distinction in 1993 in the field of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization.
A second line of research focuses on the emergence of Jewish culture in the centuries following the biblical age, a topic that encompasses the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish-Greek writers like Philo and Josephus, and Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical works like 1 Maccabees.
[10] He is currently pursuing a study of Penn's Positive Psychology Center and its ongoing impact on American religious life.