He earned a master's degree at Temple University in 1983, a second master's degree at Cornell University in 1985,[2] and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1986, with Juris Hartmanis as his doctoral advisor.
[3] He became a faculty member at Yale University (1986-1989), Princeton University (1989-1993), and SUNY Buffalo (1993-2000), rising from Assistant Professor to Full Professor in 1996.
[5] He received a Morningside Silver Medal, and a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S.
[2] He was jointly awarded the Gödel Prize in 2021, an award in theoretical computer science for his work in the paper titled: Complexity of Counting CSP with Complex Weights.
[2] He was named to the 2023 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, "for contributions to computational complexity theory, especially in the areas of complexity dichotomy".