He conducts research in two areas -- X-ray studies of star formation and the cross-disciplinary astrostatistics -- where he wrote seminal papers in the foundation of the subfields and continues to play a leading role.

He was the inaugural President of the International Astronomical Union Commission on Astroinformatics & Astrostatistics and editor the online Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal. Since 2016, he serves as the first Statistical Scientific Editor of the American Astronomical Society Journals. He is now engaged in a statistical approach to exoplanet detection based on parametric autoregressive modeling, and in preparations for the Rubin Observatory optical surveys of the sky.