He received his PhD from the University of Arizona under the supervision of Prof. B. J. Bayly in 1993. He was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow supervised by Andrew Bernoff. He served on the faculty at University of Massachusetts Lowell before joining the University of Delaware in 2001. His research interests include vorticity dynamics, vortex methods, smoothed particle hydrodynamics, high performance computation, biologically-inspired algorithms and miscellaneous topics in mathematical modeling. His computational work is best characterized as careful analysis aimed at producing new high performance mesh-free methods. He serves as Associate Editor for SIAM Review and SIAM Undergraduate Research Online. He maintains BlobFlow, an open source, high precision, parallel vortex method for viscous flow simulations.