He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 2012. His group seeks to make high-throughput biological datasets easy for biomedical researchers to use by applying ideas from sequence alignment, text indexing, statistics and parallel programming. He has released several high-impact software tools (e.g. Bowtie, Bowtie 2) and his paper describing Bowtie won the Genome Biology award for outstanding paper in 2009, and he is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Research Fellowship.