He studied computer engineering at Clarkson University and after receiving his degree worked as a systems programmer at the Yale computer science department. He joined the University of Washington Genome Center in 1998 to work on sequencing informatics for the Human Genome Project. In 2000 he joined the newly formed ISB to work on improving the computational methods for annotating interspersed repeats in genomic sequences. In collaboration with Dr. Arian Smit he expanded the RepeatMasker program and developed a new open-source variant of the BlastN algorithm tuned for use with RepeatMasker. He developed RepeatModeler, a tool for the de-novo identification of repetitive sequences in genomes and co-developed Dfam, a database of Transposable Element profile HMMs.