last updated in July 2004
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if you're trying to locate me, look here
some kind of CV:
Born in 1964 in Recklinghausen in Germany, I was soon after carried off to Northern Germany, so I don't know anything about Recklinghausen, sorry. I know a lot about Namibia (that's the beautiful country on the west coast of Africa, between Angola and South Africa) because I grew up and went to school there from 1976 to 1983.
I thought that science was great in Germany so I took up geophysics at the institute that now houses this very web server (yes: Kiel, almost in Denmark) because I'd become interested in geo-things in Africa but didn't like memorising lots of funny names (i.e., I didn't like geology). Studying geophysics also was a bit strange, so it took me until 1991 to get a diploma. My subject then was online storm surge prediction for the German Bay.
I got interested in earthquake prediction research during the final semesters (the guys responsible for this are now at GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam). And I was fascinated by fractals. I knew as little about fractals as I knew about Japan. So, in 1992, I obtained a combined scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education and the DAAD and went to Kyoto as a "research student". My supervisors at Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) of Kyoto University soon suggested to enter the regular "Doctors Course", doubling my planned stay in Japan to four years in all. At DPRI I was able to work quite freely on fractal geometry and nonlinear time series analysis, applying the methods to local earthquake and landslide data. I also produced a Study Guide Japan for the DAAD - it's in German.
My Japanese language skills deteriorate since my return to Germany in 1996 but my wife, whom I met in Japanese language class in Kyoto, is far worse off: Her Japanese gets replaced by German now! She had gone to Kyoto to study in Global Environmental Engineering after graduating in architecture from University of the Philippines in Manila.
It just so happened that somebody was needed to teach students computational methods and clean up and maintain the institute's data processing facilities in 1996 so that I ended up in Kiel again... That's where I'm now. In January 1999 I was fed up with being a system administrator and switched to assistant professor, however. I now head the group Statistical Geophysics and Geoinformatics at our department.
What the famous German poet Christian Morgenstern wrote about me.
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