He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in 1966. In 1971, he received the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Berkeley campus. He was a Guggenheim Fellow during 1972-3. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the American Vacuum Society, the International Plasma Chemistry Society, and the Institute of Physics (Great Britain). He received the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award in 1995, the von Engel Prize of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics in 2005, and the Will Allis Prize for Study of Ionized Gases in 2006.

He has also collaborated with Prof. A.J. Lichtenberg on research in nonlinear dynamics. His monograph, co-authored with A.J. Lichtenberg, Regular and Stochastic Motion, was published by Springer-Verlag in 1983. A second edition, Regular and Chaotic Dynamics, was published in 1991. His latest book, also co-authored with A.J. Lichtenberg, Principles of Plasma Discharges and Materials Processing, was published by John Wiley and Sons in 1994. An expanded second edition was published in 2005, a Chinese language edition in 2007, and a Japanese language edition in 2010.