Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2011. His research career has led to many successful open-source projects, including CliffGuard (the first robust framework for database tuning), DBSeer (the first automated database diagnosis tool), and BlinkDB (the first massively parallel approximate query engine). He has won the National Science Foundation CAREER award, as well as several best paper awards in ACM SIGMOD and EuroSys. He is also a co-founder of DBSeerand a strategic advisor to SnappyData, a company that commercializes the ideas introduced by BlinkDB.