He received his Bachelors degree with honors in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 2000. From there, he went to the University of Amsterdam, for both Masters (2001) and PhD (2006) degrees, writing a thesis on Kolmogorov Complexity and Formula Size Lower Bounds. After postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Orsay, Paris, Rutgers University, and Columbia University, he joined the Centre for Quantum Technologies as a Senior Research Fellow in 2010. In 2013 he was awarded a NRF fellowship and became an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University. In 2014 he became a Principal Investigator at CQT.