He received his Diploma in Computer Science Engineering from ETH Zurich in 1995 and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Basel in 1999. His research interests are in data mining and data matching (record linkage), with a special focus on privacy-preserving techniques and computational challenges for record linkage. He has published over 120 articles in these areas, including in 2012 the book “Data Matching” published by Springer. He is the principle developer of the Febrl (Freely Extensible Biomedical Record Linkage) open source data cleaning, de-duplication and record linkage system.