He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley under the guidance of Elchanan Mossel. From 2007-2009, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research. From 2009-2012, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California-Los Angeles. He was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and he is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. His research interests lie at the interface of applied probability, statistics, and theoretical computer science — with an emphasis on biological applications, notably mathematical phylogenetics.