He received his PhD from Stanford in 1989. In the past 10 years, he has held summer or sabbatical research positions at Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratories, Bell Labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and RIACS (NASA-Ames). His research areas are numerical analysis, optimization and computational geometry. He is the author of the QMG mesh generation software package, which is based on an algorithm developed jointly with S. Mitchell. He is a previous winner of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.