He graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1998. As a graduate student, he led the efforts to develop the Paradise database system, a parallel object-relational database system, which was purchased by NCR Corporation in 1998. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin, he joined NCR where he helped with the efforts to commercialize the Paradise system. Since 1999, he has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where his research has focused on XML data management systems, bioinformatics, and spatial data management systems. He has served on a number of program committees including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, and IEEE TKDE, and is currently the associate editor for the Systems and Prototype section of ACM SIGMOD Record.