Grossman completed his PhD at Cornell University and his undergraduate studies at Rice University. His research interests lie in the area of programming languages, ranging from theory to design to implementation, with a focus on improving software quality. In recent years, he has focused on better techniques for expressing multithreaded programs, particularly using languages with well-defined support for transactional memory. In prior work, he focused on type-safe systems programming using the Cyclone language, which he developed with colleagues.