in physics in 1987 after completing a senior thesis titled "An experimental search for 1.7 MEV axions in nuclear decays, 'the detector from hell'.
"[6] He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1994 from University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Władysław J. Świątecki and Robert Grayson Littlejohn.
After graduating with a PhD, he spent ten years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and since 2006 he has been faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park.
His research is primarily in the area of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, where he has contributed to an understanding of how the laws of thermodynamics apply to nanoscale systems.
His current interests also include the thermodynamics of information processing, as well as shortcuts to adiabaticity in quantum, classical and stochastic systems.