He received his M.S degree in Physics and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Minnesota. His research interests span a broad range of data mining problems, from pattern discovery (association analysis, anomaly detection, and cluster analysis) to predictive modeling. In addition to addressing fundamental problems in data mining, he is also interested in applying data mining techniques to various application domains including climate and Earth sciences, social and information networks, botnet/webspam detection, and medical informatics. He is the first author of a widely used data mining textbook, which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Greek, and is the recipient of the Withrow Distinguished Scholar Award for junior faculty at MSU in 2010.