He received his BSc (99) and MEng (01) degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following his master study, he spent 3.5 years in Japan working on audio compression algorithms at Texas Instruments Japan, and finally teaching English at a private high school in Tokyo. In 2004 he began his doctoral studies at the University of Washington in the Department Aeronautics and Astronautics, and graduated in 2009. From 2010-2012 he served as a post-doctoral research associate and lecturer at the Institute for Systems Theory & Automatic Control in the University of Stuttgart. His research interests include topics related to multi-agent systems, control and optimization, and graph theory.