He finished his PhD in computer science at the University of Waterloo in 2006 (with prof. Ming Li and prof. Dan Brown), and he has been a postdoctoral researcher in biological statistics at Cornell University (with prof. Adam Siepel). His research interests include bioinformatics and algorithms. Besides computing problems, Dr. Vinar often collaborates with life science researchers and he has contributed to several large international genome sequencing projects, such as macaque, marmoset, panda, and orang-utan.