He received his Ph.D. from MIT for his work on the exokernel operating system and his undergraduate degree from University of Arizona, the latter in large part funded by being a bouncer. His research mainly focuses on devising automatic methods to find as many interesting bugs in real code as possible, including static analysis, implementation-level model checking, and symbolic execution. His research group has won numerous "Best Paper'' awards and produced successful tools (both open-source and commercial) that have found millions of errors in mature systems. Most recently he has been developing systems for computer-controlled (CNC) fabrication machines; his work using these systems has appeared in numerous fashion runway shows. He won the 2006 Weiser award and the 2008 ACM Grace M Hopper award.