He was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ben received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and received a M.S. and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory. After completing his doctoral work, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at Caltech. Ben is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, and the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Machine Learning Research.