He joined RIT in 2010 after completing a Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department of Columbia University with Prof. Shree Nayar, Prof. Peter Belhumeur, and Prof. Ravi Ramamoorthi. His research interests are computational imaging, computer vision and computer graphics. He is particularly interested in understanding and modeling the physics-based image formation mechanism and the intrinsic structure of the visual appearance of various types of natural phenomena, and applying them in: computational photography for capturing high-quality, information-rich photographs and videos, physics-based computer vision for recovering higher-level information such as geometry, material properties, and illumination, and data-driven computer graphics for acquiring and recreating realistic visual appearance of natural phenomena.