He received his BSc degree in computational & applied mathematics and computer science from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He took a position as Postdoctoral Research Associate in the USC Interaction lab in 2008, before joining Texas A&M. His research aims to synthesize and analyze complex, intelligent behavior in distributed systems that exploit their physical embedding to interact with the physical world. Although his focus is on multi-robot applications of these ideas, his broader research interests include unconventional and statistical models of computation, cooperation and competition in artificial systems, emergence, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of finite systems.