He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in June 2011 from MIT, and he received a B.A. in Mathematics as well as a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in May 2005 from Rice University. He was awarded the Jin-Au Kong Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral thesis in Electrical Engineering at MIT (2012), the Young Researcher Prize in Continuous Optimization at the Fourth International Conference on Continuous Optimization of the Mathematical Optimization Society (2013, awarded once every three years), an Okawa Research Grant in Information and Telecommunications (2013), and an NSF CAREER award (2014). His research interests lie in mathematical optimization and its application to the information sciences.