His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to try to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He received his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 2005, and taught in the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University before moving to Berkeley. His work and that of his students has received awards from the Neural Information Processing Systems conference and the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, and in 2006 IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine named him one of "Ten to watch in AI."