Kirk graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, after which spent three years doing QA in both pharmaceutical and nutraceutical industries before returning to school to pursue a PhD.  He graduated from Colorado School of Mines in 2014 with a doctorate in applied chemistry with expertise in mass spectrometry, microbiology, and statistics.  He then took a position at Osaka University as a research scientist exploring closed-path time-of-flight mass spectrometry for three years before joining JEOL USA, Inc. in 2019.