He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2005 and a B.S. with honors from Caltech in 1998. His research focuses on machine learning, graphical models, and algorithms for exact and approximate inference, with applications to areas such as sensor networks, computer vision, data mining, and computational biology. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and several best paper awards at conferences including NIPS, IPSN, and AISTATS.