I am a full Professor at Universtià della Svizzera italiana - USI, where I hold a chair of Advanced Scientific Computing in the Faculty of informatics of the Università della Svizzera italiana - USI and I am the Director of the Euler Institute, a major node in Switzerland for research and education in computational and data science. Imbedded into a dense network of national and international cooperation partners, the Euler Institute carries out high-level research with a general focus on computational methods for life sciences, social sciences, natural and environmental sciences, economy, and engineering.
As an interdisciplinary institute, the Euler Institute hosts a broad range of scientific activities and projects, which are concentrated in the areas Computational Science & Engineering (CSE), Computational Medicine and Life Sciences, Data Science and Computational Statistics, and Machine Learning. The Euler Institute gladly cooperates with the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA. I am also the Co-director of the Center for Computational Medicine in Cardiology (CCMC) at USI.
From 2003 to 2009, I was professor for Scientific Computing at the University of Bonn. During that time I spent a sabbatical at UC San Diego (USA) and Columbia University New York (USA). In 2002 I was on a research visit at the Courant Institute (NYU, New York). I hold a Diploma and a PhD (2000) in Applied Mathematics from FU Berlin (Germany). I am the head of the group "High Performance Methods for Numerical Simulation in Science, Medicine, and Engineering".
The research in my group focuses on numerical simulation for complex and data-intensive applications, techniques for advanced machine learning, and scientific software for large scale applications and HPC. As a new direction of research, the transfer of techniques from scientific computing and HPC to machine learning has been established in his group, paving the road to ExaScale ML. On the software side, in my group Utopia, a hardware portable library for Scientific Computing and Machine Learning is developed, which allows for efficiently exploiting modern and possibly specialized hardware, such as GPUs and other accelerators.
In terms of applications, focus areas are medicine, in particular cardiology; image analysis; geo-physics and geo-mechanics, including porous media and the modeling of fracture networks; computational mechanics for non-smooth systems, including friction and contact. My editorial service includes the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing (SISC) and Computing and Visualizatio in Science (Springer), and Numerische Mathematik (Springer).