Rockwell graduated from Columbia College in 2014 with a degree in physics and completed a post-bach in biology at Western Connecticut State University in 2015. Before arriving at Harvard in 2017, Rockwell worked at the Broad Institute in the lab of Eric Lander studying enhancer/promoter interactions in human blood cancers. Rockwell is broadly interested in the evolution of animal behavior. He currently works on using machine learning methods to identify biologically relevant behaviors with the goal of comparing behaviors between individuals and across species. Rockwell received a James Mills Pierce Fellowship. He is jointly advised by Hopi Hoekstra and Bob Datta (at Harvard Medical School).