He received a B.S. in Mathematics from JSU in 1999 and an M.S. in Systems and Software Design from JSU in 2002. In the summer of 2001, he was awarded a NASA research fellowship and worked at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, with Dr. Yair Barniv using machine intelligence to predict head movements based on electromyogram (EMG) data. In 2008, he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Auburn University in Auburn, AL. His research areas are evolutionary computation and multiobjective optimization.