Charles earned his B.S. degree in Psychology and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. His Ph.D. thesis project with his mentor, Dr. Flavio Frohlich, focused on studying higher-order visual processing in the ferret parietal cortex using 2-photon calcium imaging, a method that utilizes state-of-the-art laser microscopes and genetic tools to visualize neural activity in a micron-level scale. Charles now works at the University of Washington Center for Neurobiology Addiction, Pain, and Emotion (NAPE) as a microscopy core director where he develops analysis programs for calcium imaging data and manages the center's 2-photon microscope space.