About

I am the scientific director of the Research Facility for Subsurface Remediation (VEGAS) at the University of Stuttgart.
I am an environmental engineer and hydrogeologist who strives to understand natural and engineered systems better. Measuring, collecting, and analysing data, as well as building stochastic and numeric models together with the analysis of their output, help me to achieve this goal.

👉 Research
👉 blog
👉 planetwater
👉 my public github page

PFAS, their transport behaviour and remediation technologies are currently the focus of my work.

Most research code is under development, but our recent paper is a great example that comes with data, model and model output – all under FAIR conditions, available at the University of Stuttgart’s open repository!

I maintain an open collection of useful things for graduate students.

Here is an example of a fun open project bringing basic latex functionality into OmniOutliner.

For current ongoings, please visit the presences of VEGAS at mathstodon and my private account on mathstodon!

Teaching

Currently, I am teaching the following courses:

• Core Subject “Soil” in Environmental Engineering at the University of Stuttgart including “Soil Engineering” and “Soil Experiments” (together with Simon Kleinknecht and Tobias Junginger)
• Environmental Measuring and Monitoring (together with Tobias Junginger);
• Groundwater and Soil Remediation (together with Simon Kleinknecht and Tobias Junginger);
• Field Course Hydrogeology (together with Simon Kleinknecht, Tobias Junginger, and Jochen Seidel)
• Statistics for Civil Engineering;
• Statistik und Geostatistik für den Zertifikatsstudiengang “Geodatenmanager”;

Previously, I have been teaching the following courses:

• “Environmental Modelling 1” and “Geostatistics” at the University of Tübingen;
• Statistics, Geostatistics, Hydrological Simulations, Numerische Datenverarbeitung at the University of Stuttgart;
• Groundwater Resources Management (Earth 654), Groundwater Modelling (Earth 456/656), and Chemical Hydrogeology (Earth 459) at the University of Waterloo.

I have been teaching courses/lectures on “Stochastic Hydrogeology” and “Integrated Hydrosystem Modelling” (Fall School at University of Tübingen), as well as “Statistics of Hydrological Extremes”.

I make a point to teach open source scientific programming skills using python and distributed version control.

Background

I received a Dipl.-Ing. degree of environmental engineering at the University of Stuttgart, Germany (2005) and a M.Sc. degree in earth sciences (hydrogeology) at the University of Waterloo, Canada (2005). The title of my thesis is “Quantifying Effects of Land-Use Changes to Municipal Groundwater Quality” and I was advised by Dave Rudolph, Neil Thomson, and Emil Frind.

I received a Dr.-Ing. degree with distinction in 2011 at the University of Stuttgart for my dissertation entitled “Analysis of Real-World Spatial Dependence of Subsurface Hydraulic Properties Using Copulas With a Focus on Solute Transport Behaviour”. During my dissertation I was advised by Prof. András Bárdossy and Prof. Ed Sudicky. I held a research associate position at the Department of Hydrology and Geohydrology at the University of Stuttgart (2011-2012).

During the next phase, I was the PostDoc of the International Research Training Group “Integrated Hydrosystem Modelling” at the University of Tübingen (2012-2014). In 2014, I joined WESS as a research associate, became a senior research associate at the University of Tübingen, Department of Geosciences, where I ran my junior research group (DFG funded) starting in October 2015 within the Hydrogeology Workgroup. In 2018, I successfully completed my habilitation entitled “Improved Statistics and Geostatistics for Subsurface Hydrology”.

Since January 2019, I am “Scientist and Technical Director” of the “research facility of subsurface remediation” (Versuchseinrichtung zur Grundwasser- und Altlastensanierung, VEGAS) within the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems (IWS) at the University of Stuttgart.

I was the Outstanding Student Paper Award Winner (hydrology) at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in 2009.

My Erdős number is likely 5 (via MathSciNet).