Previously, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England from 2011 to 2013; before that, he was a postdoc with the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University and the Department of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2011, supervised by Tong Zhang and Sham M. Kakade. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2010 from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he was advised by Sanjoy Dasgupta. He received his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2004 from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.