He earned a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University in 2003 and a BS in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece in 1997. Drineas' research interests lie in the design and analysis of randomized algorithms for linear algebraic problems, as well as their applications to the analysis of modern, massive datasets. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and was a Visiting Professor at the Sandia National Laboratories during the fall of 2005, a visiting fellow at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles in the fall of 2007, and has also worked for industrial labs (including Yahoo! Research and Microsoft Research). From October 2010 to December 2011, Drineas served as a Program Director in the CISE directorate of the National Science Foundation.