He received an AB/SM in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1997, and a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. After a research fellowship at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, he joined the USC Information Sciences Institute in 2006, where he currently works on formal grammars for statistical machine translation. He has served on the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, as an area chair for ACL and EMNLP, and as a local organizer for NAACL HLT 2010.