When he was 13, his mother got Patrick a subscription to Natural History. The essays by Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond Biology on evolution stimulated an interest in the how’s and why’s of biology.
As an undergraduate, he cleaned cichlid tanks for Jay Stauffer at Penn State which lead to a lifelong love of cichlids. After a year in Malawi on a Fulbright Fellowship, Patrick went to Thomas Kocher’s lab at the University of New Hampshire for his Ph.D. on the behavior, ecology and evolution of cichlids. During his postdoc, Patrick switched systems and studied the evolutionary divergence of Hawaiian crickets with Kerry Shaw at the University of Maryland.
Returning to his first love, Patrick established a lab studying cichlid evolution at Baylor University. Since then, he has developed a research program that studies the biogeography and evolution of North American and Chinese stream fishes.