Relying on a detailed representation of the actual material microstructure, his models allow to understand microscopic mechanisms in biological materials and subsequently mimic and adapt those to new man-made sustainable materials with unprecedented mechanical properties used in large-scale Civil and Environmental Engineering applications. He is particularly interested in soft matter materials such as elastomers, nonwoven fabrics, hydrogels, or cellular foams and his numerical methods range from macroscopic continuum based finite element simulations to highly parallelized nanoscale electronic structure calculations.