After graduating from the University of Miami with a degree in Music Engineering, Willie realized he could apply his computational and signal processing skills to the biological questions in neurophysiology and joined Zhongmin Lu’s lab in the Department of Biology in 2002. He then started working on his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, rotating under great scientists like Steve Roper and Vittorio Porciatti. He joined Vance Lemmon & John Bixby’s laboratory studying neuron regeneration and started getting involved with data-driven approaches to science. He then did his first postdoctoral training under Michael Lotze at the University of Pittsburgh looking at heterotypic interactions between cancer cells and immune cells. His second postdoctoral training took him to Washington University where he worked with Jeff Milbrandt on the mouse shRNA screen that discovered the SARM1 protein. He got his first faculty position at the College of William & Mary in Virginia in 2013. He then returned to St. Louis and joined the Department of Genetics at Wash U in 2017.