His research focuses on artificially evolving complex solutions to difficult real-world tasks. He graduated with a B.S.E. in Computer Science Engineering and a minor in Cognitive Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He received an M.S. in Computer Science in 1999, and a Ph.D. in 2004 at the University of Texas at Austin. He has won best paper awards for his work on NEAT (at the 2002 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) and for his work on NERO (at the IEEE 2005 Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games), and also won the Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Award (at the 2006 Game Developers conference) for NERO.