He is the Director of the Computational Design Optimization of Engineering Systems (CODES) laboratory. He received his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse, France, in 1999. Prior to his appointment at the University of Arizona in 2005, he was a lecturer at the Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci, France (2002-2005) and a post-doctoral fellow at Virginia Tech (1999-2002). He is a member of both the AIAA Non-Deterministic Approaches technical committee and the AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization technical committee. His research focuses on the development and advanced applications of new optimization, reliability, and risk assessment techniques based on machine learning and data mining approaches.