He did his undergraduate work in geomatics engineering. He holds a M.S. in Applied Geography (GIS emphasis) from the University of North Texas and a M.S. in GIS from the University of Tehran. His Ph.D. is from University of North Texas in Information Systems. His research interests include location intelligence, social networks, information privacy, and GIS. He received the best doctoral paper award for two consecutive years while at University of North Texas. He is currently working on a spatial big data project and a social network rumor diffusion pattern research.