I received my Ph.D. in civil engineering in 2013 from UCLA, and worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Structural Engineering and the Center for Extreme Events Research (CEER) at UC San Diego until I joined Penn State in 2016. Until recently, I was an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at Penn State and held the L. Robert and Mary L. Kimball Endowed Professorship. My research has been funded by NSF, the DOD, and private industry.

My research of naturally stabilized nodal integration formulated under the framework of variational consistency (VC-NSNI) has enabled high accuracy, stability, and efficiency not previously possible in computationally challenging applications such as penetration/fragment-impact, blast-loaded structures, landslides, explosive welding, earth moving, and 3D printing. These methods have also allowed numerical investigation of complex phenomena, including shock wave propagation in solids under blast and impact loadings, shear band formation in landslides, and failure mechanisms in man-made disasters.

These  methods have been implemented into codes used by the DoD (US Army Corps of Engineers' NMAP, NMAP-Micro, and MEGA), DoE (Sandia National Laboratories' SIERRA), the commercial code LS-DYNA, as well as codes used in private industry (MECA - Case New Holland Industrial America LLC, and FEMFREE - Karagozian & Case Inc.).

MEGA and MECA are in-house Hillman Lab parallel (OpenMP) FORTRAN90 codes written mostly by myself from scratch, but later features were written by my students and postdocs.

Recently, I received the NSF CAREER award as well as my tenure at Penn State. I left Penn State shortly after and will soon join ​Karagozian & Case Inc. in October 2022.