He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2006. His graduate work focused on models and algorithms for improving access to organized information with applications to web site design and optimal decision making. During the final year of his graduate studies, Brent helped several other computer scientists start Cogo Labs (formerly Adverplex)---a company dealing primarily with pay-per-click advertising. In 2009 Brent was a visiting scholar at Boston University where, with colleagues from BU and Harvard, he worked on combinatorial problems related to heaps. Brent's current research focus is on data structures, non-traditional data encodings, and information visualization.