His primary research interest is the secure management of large-scale data. This includes evaluating threats to privacy in published data, devising techniques for the safe publication of social networks, network traces, and audit logs, as well as designing database management systems to implement security policies. He was awarded a Lilly Teaching Fellowship in 2011, an NSF CAREER Award in 2007, and he won the 2006 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005. He earned Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995.