He holds a Ph.D. in Library and Information Services from the University of Maryland at College Park. His research interests have been in cross-language information retrieval, speech retrieval, and information seeking in multilingual and multimedia environments. He also played a major role in building test collections for four Interactive CLEF (iCLEF) tracks, two CLEF Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR) tracks, and the first TREC Legal Discovery track.