He has been on the CMU faculty since 1994. Prior to joining CMU, Dr. Lafferty was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, working on statistical methods for language processing. Dr. Lafferty received the Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University, where he was a also member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He is a past editorial board member of Computational Linguistics, and is currently an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and the Machine Learning journal. His research interests include statistical learning algorithms, natural language processing, information retrieval, and coding and information theory.