He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a research scientist at the NASA-Ames Research Center, before coming Stanford. His research spans an interdisciplinary cross-section of engineering, psychology, and neuroscience, the current focus of which is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to quantitatively investigate the relationship between brain and behavior. He was awarded the David Marr Prize in computer vision in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in neuroscience in 1994, and the Troland Award in psychology from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.