Wes received his BS degree at Carnegie Mellon University before moving to MIT for his PhD studies in the lab of Prof. Christopher (Kit) Cummins and then to Stanford as an NIH NRSA F32 postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Ed Solomon. His doctoral work in inorganic synthesis focused on developing routes to access reactive organophosphorus species and on the assembly of transition metal–main group multiple bonds. His postdoctoral research centered on spectroscopic characterization of paramagnetic centers in metalloenzymes and model complexes to map out reactivity patterns and electronic structure. His independent research program will combine these backgrounds in synthesis and spectroscopy to prepare new inorganic/organometallic compounds with applications in quantum computing and quantum information science.