His research is focused on how individuals interact with data and how that data is processed and understood. He received his doctoral degree in physics from Stanford University in 2009. He completed postdoctoral work at the University of California at San Diego and an NSF Fellowship in Transformative Computational Science at Columbia University. He came to Illinois in 2014 to work as a research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and as a research assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy.