Dan joined Rice University’s Office of Technology Transfer in September 2007. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Kettering University in 2005. While at Kettering, he worked as a mechanical engineering co-op student at Wright Industries in Nashville, Tennessee, where he designed automated assembly equipment. He worked as a full-time Mechanical Design Engineer at Wright for a year before enrolling in the MS-MBA program at the University of Tennessee. While at Tennessee, he worked as graduate assistant in the Technology Transfer Office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 2007, he received his MBA and M.S. (industrial engineering) degrees.