Ungar received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He directed Penn's Executive Masters of Technology Management (EMTM) program for a decade, and is currently the associate director of the Penn Center for BioInformatics (PCBI). Ungar has published over 100 articles and holds eight patents. His current research focuses on developing scalable machine learning methods for data mining and text mining.