After obtaining his PhD at MIT in 2005, he has held postdoctoral positions at Ecole Normal Superieure/Ecole Polytechnique, Utrecht university and CERN. He is currently a recipient of the VIDI grant. His research interests range between applications of string theory, in particular the gauge/gravity duality to strongly interacting quantum field theories that arise in particle physics, and condensed matter physics to more formal aspects of string theory.