Vita

Personal Data

Date & Place of birth: May 22, 1980, Mühlhausen/Thüringen, Germany
Citizenship: German

Research Experience

09/2007 - present
Research Associate, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Postdoctoral research position in the Computational Mathematics group of Prof. Stefan A. Sauter
(Partially financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation)

10/2004 - 08/2007
Research Assistant, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
PhD position in the Computational Mathematics group of Prof. Stefan A. Sauter
(Partially financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation)

Education

10/2004 - 06/2007
Dr. sc. nat. (comparable to Ph.D.), Universität Zürich, Switzerland
Supervisor: Prof. Stefan A. Sauter
Scientific focus: Numerical Analysis, Computational Mathematics, especially Finite Element Methods for PDE's on complicated domains
Thesis: The Composite Mini Element

10/1999 - 05/2004
Dipl.-Math. (comparable to M.Sc.), TU Ilmenau, Germany
Scientific focus: Computational Mathematics, Numerical Analysis and Optimization, Functional Analysis, Theoretical and Technical Informatics
Thesis: Efficient numerical continuation algorithms and stability analysis of periodical orbits of dynamical systems (orig. German, advised by Doz. Dr. Werner Vogt)

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Forschung

Finite Element Methods for PDE's on complicated domains

In classical finite element methods triangulations have to resolve the physical domain. This condition becomes crucial if the domain boundary is rough or the domain contains a lot of holes. In contrast to that, composite finite elements are defined on very flexible overlapping grids. The refinement in the grids is only used to adapt the shape of the element functions and does not in crease the space dimension.(Literature on composite finite elements)The concept allows to approximate PDEs on general domains by finite elements defined on structered grids.


The composite mini element is a stable composite finite element pair for the Stokes problem with mixed boundary conditions (Dirichlet, Neumann, slip, leak, ...). It allows reasonable approximations of Stokes flows on complicated domains with only a few degrees of freedom.(Literature on the composite mini element)

Dynamical systems, Bifurcation

Electric power systems can be modeled by (large) systems of nonlinear differential equations. Invariant solutions of such models, i.e. stationary points, periodic and quasi-periodic solutions are thereby of special interest. These solutions can be interpreted as the states of the power system. The switching between states and their stability usually depends on various parameters such as temperatures, material constants, resistors, etc.
Numerical algorithms for the approximation of the paramter dependence of the system should provide high accuracy and stability.