Prior to joining EPFL, he was assistant professor at the CS department of ETH Zurich since April 2005. From August 2003 to March 2005 he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where he also held a position as visiting assistant professor during the summer of 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree (with distinction) in 2003 from ETH Zurich and his M.S. degree (with highest honors) in 1999 from TU Kaiserslautern. His research interests include computer graphics and animation, geometry processing, shape modeling and analysis, and computational geometry. He was recipient of a full-time scholarship of the German National Merit Foundation, received the ETH medal for outstanding dissertation, and was awarded the Eurographics Young Researcher Award in 2006.