His research interests encompass both theoretical foundations and system development in the areas of formal methods, software engineering and programming languages. Before joining UIUC in 2002, he was a research scientist at NASA Ames. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego in 2000 and his M.S. at the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1996. He was offered the CAREER award by the NSF and the outstanding junior award by the Computer Science Department at UIUC in 2005. He won an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at ASE 2008 and the best software science paper award at ETAPS 2002. He was ranked a UIUC excellent teacher in Spring 2013, Fall 2012, Spring 2008 and Fall 2004.