He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT in 1977, a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford in 1985, and an M.D. from Stanford in 1986. His primary research interests involve the application of decision theory, probability theory, Bayesian statistics, and artificial intelligence to biomedical informatics research tasks, including causal modeling and discovery from data, and computer-aided diagnosis and prediction. Since 2001 he has been developing detection algorithms for biosurveillance in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.