Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, he served as a postdoc with NISS from 2003 to 2004, where he worked on statistical techniques called random forests for applications in software engineering research. In addition to NISS, Haran also spent time as a research fellow with SAMSI in 2009 for the program “Space-Time Analysis for Environmental Mapping, Epidemiology and Climate Change,” and has continued to collaborate with SAMSI fellows.