He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and was a postdoctoral scholar in Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University and the Neurosurgery Department of University of California San Francisco. He has been named a Pew Scholar for Innovative Biomedical Research, and has received several distinctions including the National Science Foundation Early Career Award and Kavli Institute for Brain Science Award. His interdisciplinary research combines theoretical and experimental techniques to model the neural mechanisms involved in human speech communication which critically impacts research in modeling speech processing and speech brain-computer interface technologies.