About myself

In words

I studied physics (Technische Physik) at the Vienna Technical University in Austria and graduated in theoretical physics in 2004. In my master thesis, I studied the phase behavior of fluid mixtures in the Soft Matter Theory group of Dr. Gerhard Kahl and in collaboration with Dr. Nigel Wilding at the University of Bath, UK. I spent four months in his group to learn and apply advanced Monte Carlo simulation techniques.

For my PhD studies, I joined Dr. Christoph Dellago in the Computational Physics group at the University of Vienna. There, I studied the unusual properties of single-file water in narrow pores in cooperation with Dr. Gerhard Hummer at the National Institutes of Health, U.S.A.

From 2009 to 2013, I have been working as a Visiting Fellow in Dr. Gerhard Hummer's "Theoretical Biophysics" group at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, U.S.A. One of our interests is how to use experimental data with low structural information content in combination with molecular simulation to obtain structural models of biological macromolecules performing their functions.

In August 2013, I joined Dr. Hummer's Department of Theoretical Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as a project leader.

In December 2021, I finished my Habilitation at the Department of Physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The title of my cumulative Habilitation thesis is "Integrating experiments and molecular simulations by ensemble refinement".

My research for the interested layperson

My general fields of interest range from the phase behavior of soft and condensed matter to nanotechnology and biophysics.

A common thread in my research is how properties of complex systems emerge from the interplay of their microscopic constituents. For example, the macroscopic properties of water, e.g., water is wet and boils at 100 degrees Celsius at atmospheric pressure, are determined by the microscopic properties of the water molecules. The latter are the chemical composition, the three-dimensional molecular structure, and the electrostatic properties like charge and dipole moment. The problem of determining the macroscopic properties of water from the knowledge of its microscopic properties is given by a few fundamental equations of physics. However, these equations can be solved analytically only for a limited number of systems. Therefore, additional theoretical and computational methods, models, and algorithms have to be developed to tackle such problems.

The category my work fits in best is computational science with focus on computational physics, which is concerned with making problems tractable using computers that are intractable otherwise. My activities include computer simulations, model development, statistical data analysis, design of computational methods and algorithms, and programming (Python, Julia, shell scripting, experience in Mathematica, C, C++).