I studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained my PhD from MIT in 1995. From 1995 to 1998, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, working with Geoff Hinton. I was one of the founding faculty members of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL (1998-2005) and in 2006 I moved to the University of Cambridge where I am Professor of Information Engineering. I am also a faculty member in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University since 2002.

My current research interests include Bayesian approaches to machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics, information retrieval, bioinformatics, and econometrics. Statistics provides the mathematical foundation for handling uncertainty, making decisions, and designing learning systems. I have recently worked on Gaussian processes, non-parametric Bayesian methods, clustering, approximate inference algorithms, graphical models, Monte Carlo methods, and semi-supervised learning.

I am originally Iranian, grew up in Russia and Spain, studied in the USA and Canada, and have lived in the UK since 1998.