Prior to his current appointment he spent almost seven years at Carnegie Mellon University where he completed two postdoctoral fellowships (supervised by Niels Taatgen and Christian Lebiere within the ACT-R research group lead by John Anderson) and also conducted independent research. He studied Industrial Psychology in Romania (Master thesis in Human Reliability) and Information Science in the Netherlands (Ph.D. dissertation in Human-Computer Interaction). His research focuses on high-level cognitive processes such as strategic thinking and executive control of cognition and emotion, combining empirical research and computational cognitive modeling.