He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College in 2010. His research interests include corrections and reentry, criminal career, life-course criminology, collateral consequences of criminal justice interventions, and quantitative methods including social network analysis. His current research focuses on the issue of "redemption" for those with stale criminal-history records, which is when risk of recidivism declines to a level of appropriate benchmarks so that it is no longer necessary for an employer to be concerned about a criminal offense in a prospective employee's past.