He received a bachelor’s in molecular biology, a master’s in knowledge discovery and data mining, a master’s in public policy and management, and a doctorate in computer science, all from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of numerous scientific articles on biomedical informatics, data and link mining, and data privacy. His research in genetic databases and privacy has received several awards from the American and International Medical Informatics Associations. He has chaired various workshops on privacy and data mining for the IEEE and ACM. From 2004 through 2006 he was the managing editor of the Journal of Privacy Technology (JOPT) and is the guest editor for an upcoming special issue on privacy and data mining for the journal Data and Knowledge Engineering.