He received his PhD in Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington. Before coming to UT-Austin, he has taught at the University of Washington and Ball State University. His primary interest is in urban form and environment. He wants to understand how people react and reflect the built environments where they live, work, and play. He has investigated the relationship between food/built environment and obesity, built environment and grocery shopping travel, the identification of food deserts, and how people reflected urban spaces on Twitter during a Super Bowl week. He also interests in using different techniques to represent and quantify urban form. These techniques include Big Data Analysis, GIS, GPS, 3D Modeling, Social Media, and Statistics.