Born 1962 in Kassel, Germany, Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science TU Darmstadt (1985), Dr.rer.nat. at TU Darmstadt (1987) and Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Washington, Seattle (1987), Postdoctoral Fellow, IMA, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1987-1988), Assistant Professor, Research Institute for Symbolic Computation, Linz, Austria (1988-1989), Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University (1989-1991), Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University (1992-1996), Visiting Scholar, Courant Institute, New York University (1994-1995), Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley (1995-2001), Visiting Professor, RIMS, Kyoto University, Japan (1997-1998), Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, UC Berkeley (2001-2008), Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, UC Berkeley (since 2008), Director and Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig (since 2017), Honorary Professor, Technical University Berlin (since 2018), Honorary Professor, University of Leipzig (since 2018).
Honorary Doctoral Degree, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (2015), Einstein Visiting Fellow, TU Berlin (2015-2020, George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics (2018), Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2018).