He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Mineral Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. He then held post-doctoral positions with Laboratoire MADYLAM at the University of Grenoble, France and the Centre for Numerical Modelling and Process Analysis at the University of Greenwich, UK. He then spent five years working in the Corporate Research and Development division of Reynolds Metals Company before joining the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University where he teaches Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer and Computational Fluid Dynamics. He is a member of TMS and AIME.