He received his B.S. and Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering from Lehigh University in 2007. He worked as a Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University and a Visiting Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. He is the author of over 70 articles, and was a recipient of the 2011 Department of Energy Early Career Award, the 2013 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 2015 American Ceramic Society￿s Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars.