Dan leads the University's Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program, which provides faculty with the training and resources necessary to develop international exchanges between existing courses. Through participation in COIL cohorts, introductory sessions, individual project consultations, and COIL partnership fairs, faculty can utilize COIL programming to pursue internationalization at home, create innovative curriculum, and expand access to international learning to all students.

Dan's work is guided by his motivation to assist faculty interested in creating transformative international learning experiences for their students. He recently received a DAAD grant to connect virtual exchange, sustainability education, and in-person internships in Germany. He was also recently recognized as a University of Minnesota Distinguished Global Professor.

His academic background is in Comparative Literary Studies in Russian- and German-speaking societies, where his research focuses on gestures of truthfulness in the media and literary landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries. He continues to teach as part of the German Studies program on the Duluth campus. He is also part of the EDGES working group at UMN, Carleton, and Brandeis (Engaged Digital German Environmental Studies), which ran its inaugural summer symposium in 2024. Recent publishing work has focused on COIL and sustainability education. He is also a contributing author in The Guide to COIL Virtual Exchange (2022). He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.