Prior to this position he spent 15 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5 in the pursuit of his S.M. (1994) and his Ph.D. (1997), and the remainder of the time as a researcher in the Space Systems Laboratory. At the University of Maryland he has established the Space Power and Propulsion Laboratory, where he leads graduate and undergraduate research in a variety of technology pursuits. He was a Fellow of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), recipient of the inaugural Bepi Colombo Prize, and recently awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER grant for research in compact helicon plasma sources.