His research interests span from computational statistics to applied probability and computational topology and geometry with applications in data analysis. His research has been funded by numerous agencies, and has strong connections with the industry involving data science. He received a PhD in Statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and subsequently he was a Lockheed Martin Postdoctoral Fellow at the IMA at the University of Minnesota. He joined as an Assistant Professor the University of Tennessee in 2010, and he was a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Bath, UK during 2013-2014. He also received the Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award by the College of Arts and Sciences at UTK.