Educational carrier

09.11.1965 born in Zwickau (East-Germany)
1972-1982 ten-year-general-polytechnical school
1982-1984 professional training as gas pipe fitter and welder
1984-1987 military service in Frankenberg
1987-1988 high-school course at the Bergakademie Freiberg
1988-1993 study of Crystallography at Leipzig University
Master's thesis on the application of the Kossel technique to Quasicrystals.
1994-1997 PhD. course at University of Tsukuba (Japan)
Doctor's thesis on the Structure analysis of Quasicrystals
1997/May-July temporary stay at NIRIM (Japan)
1997-1999 postdoctorate at NIRIM (STA-Fellowship)
1999- ... programmer at MDI (Materials Data, Inc. in Livermore, California)

 

Previous work at Nirim (Japan)

All the DOS-software and most of the JAVA-software on my website are hobby projects and have little or nothing to do with my actual work.

During my PhD. I worked on the structure analysis of quasicrystals under the supervision of Dr.Akiji Yamamoto. The title of my thesis is Application of the five-dimensional maximum entropy method to the structure refinement of decagonal Al-Mn-Pd quasicrystals. Our work deals with the structure solution of quasicrystals on the basis of single (quasi)crystal X-ray data. For this we use the higher-dimensional space approach. Quasicrystals which are aperiodic in three-dimensional space can be described as periodic "crystals" in a space of usually five or six dimensions. This means that we actually solve the higher-dimensional periodic structure, from which the real three-dimensional structure is obtained by some appropriate section algorithm.

Before coming to the US I was a STA Fellow (Science and Technology Agency) at NIRIM doing a postdoctorate. In cooperation with Dr.Akiji Yamamoto I was working on various software packages for applying an imaging plate Weissenberg camera to the data collection on quasicrystals (see my JAVA applications page)

 

Other important events

On September 11, 2002 I regained perfect vision through LASIK eye-surgery at the LasikPlus Vision Center in San Jose / California ( http://www.lasikplus.com ). The procedure was performed by Dr. George V. Simon, who I highly recommend. The whole operation took about 15 minutes for both eyes. Modern Bausch-Lomb excimer lasers were used, which are able to treat larger areas and which use dancing-spot technology, which is similar to dithering in printers in that a smoother surface of the treated area is achieved.