Before that he was a Computing Innovation Fellow at Cornell University and completed his PhD at UMass Amherst in 2010. His research interests include privacy-preserving data analysis, data management, data mining, social networks, and privacy. His PhD thesis titled "Enabling Accurate Analysis of Private Network Data" is the recipient of the 2011 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award. His ICDM 2009 paper titled "Accurate estimation of the degree distribution of private networks" received the Best Student Paper award. He has given a tutorial on privacy and graphs at SIGMOD 2011.