He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in 2009, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioinformatics at the School of EECS at Oregon State University from 2010-2012. His research interests are in machine learning, probabilistic modeling, and optimization applied to large-scale problems in ecology, computational sustainability, and networks. His work was recognized by a Computational Sustainability Best Paper Award at AAAI 2013, and is supported by the NSF and MassDOT.