Before he came to Tampere he was a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Queen’s University Belfast at the Center for Cancer Research and Cell Biology. He received training as a Senior Fellow from the Department of Biostatistics and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA) working with John Storey (now Princeton University) and as Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Computational Biology at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City (USA) working with Arcady Mushegian. He studied Physics and Mathematics and obtained his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bremen (Germany) and a Diploma (with distinction) as well as a Bachelor in Theoretical Physics from the University of Siegen (Germany).