Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU and earned his PhD at Princeton University. Since 2001 he has also held appointments as a visiting scientist at Institut Curie (Paris), the Hahn-Meitner Institut (Berlin), and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (Santa Barbara). At Columbia he serves as the faculty advisor for the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) as well as the Application Development Initiative (ADI). He is a founding member of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering (IDSE), serving on the Executive Committee, the Entrepreneurship Committee, and as Advisor to the Education Committee in forming the IDSE Curriculum and a Certificate program. His research focuses on applications of machine learning to real-world data.