I entered the Ph.D. program in the Boston University Department of Physics in the fall of 1994. In 1995 I became interested in Biophysics and, as a result, I joined the Center for Polymer Studies of the Boston University Physics Department under the direction of H. Eugene Stanley. From 1995 I am collaborating with Dr. Sergey V. Buldyrev and Dr. Shlomo Havlin (Bar-Ilan University) on applying statistical mechanics tools to study repetitive patterns of coding and noncoding regions of DNA. In September 1997, I began joint work with the company British Petroleum (Dr. Peter King) to study transport phenomena in porous media, and, around the same time I started collaboration with the research group of Dr. Eugene I. Shakhnovich (Harvard University) on the problem of protein design and folding. My PhD dissertation, entitled Applications of statistical mechanics to biological macromolecules, was supervised by H. Eugene Stanley.

In 1999, I received National Institutes of Health NRSA award to work for three years as a postdoctoral fellow with Eugene Shakhnovich. In 2002, I joined Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor.