I received the BSc degree from the Technion, Israel, the MCS degree from Texas A&M University, and the PhD degree from The University of Texas at Austin (all in Computer Science). I completed my PhD dissertation on Phylogenetic Networks under the supervision of Prof. Tandy Warnow.

I joined the department of Computer Science at Rice University in July 2004 as an assistant professor. I regularly teach the computability course (COMP481) and the bioinformatics sequence analysis course (COMP571). Recently I introduced a new course in bioinformatics, focused on network analysis (COMP572), which is offered in the Spring semester. My research interests fall into two categories. (1) Bioinformatics and computational biology. In this area I work on reticulate evolution (WHO'S WHO IN PHYLOGENETIC NETWORKS), multi-locus genotype-phenotype inference, and biological signaling networks. (2) Historical linguistics. In this area, I work on developing computational methods for reconstructing the evolution of natural languages and detecting borrowing among them. Please visit my Research page to learn more about the projects we work on.