He has a B.S. in software engineering from Tehran Polytechnic in Iran, an M.S. in software engineering from Sharif University and finished his Ph.D. in computer science at Michigan State University. His research interests include machine learning, convex and non-convex optimization, statistical and computational learning theory, and applications of machine learning in learning from large and/or high dimensional data. Prior to coming to Penn State, he was a research assistance professor at Toyota Technological Institute at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several publications and was recognized as a National Elite Student by the Iranian National Foundation of Elites. He has also won a number of awards, including a best paper award at the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), and the most cited paper award from the journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier.