Eppinger was a student at Carnegie Mellon University, where in 1983, he won the George E. Forsythe Award for best undergraduate paper on his research in
binary search trees. Eppinger had made empirical studies of their behaviour under random deletions and insertions. Eppinger earned his
PhD in Computer Science in 1988. This recoverable virtual memory concept was subsequently used to implement the
Coda file system. Eppinger was a co-founder of
Transarc Corporation, which was acquired by
IBM in 1994. In 2001, Eppinger returned to Carnegie Mellon as Professor of the Practice in the School of Computer Science. == Personal life ==