After having passed the preliminary exam (German: Magister-Vorprüfung) I moved to Stuttgart in southern Germany to study Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Natural Language Processing (Institut für Machinelle Sprachverarbeitung, IMS) at the University of Stuttgart. My interests at that time were in formal semantics and I immensely enjoyed studying under Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle and working for them as a research assistant. I received my MSc (summa cum laude) in Computational Linguistics from the University of Suttgart in 1999.

While being an undergrad student in Stuttgart I spent a year as an Erasmus exchange student at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where I worked with Maarten de Rijke on Automated Theorem Proving for natural language processing. Since I enjoyed working with Maarten, and Amsterdam is a great place to live, I did my PhD at the ILLC under Maarten's supervision. At the same time I wanted to do more application-oriented research in the area of natural language information access. This led to a PhD project combining Information Retrieval and Question Answering. I received my PhD degree in 2003 from the University of Amsterdam for my thesis: From Document Retrieval to Question Answering.

After my PhD I worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, USA. During my time as post-doc I mainly worked with Bonnie Dorr on Statistical Machine Translation and on Automated Summarization. I had a great time working with Bonnie and the others in the research group, such as Doug Oard and Philip Resnik.

Since October 2005, I'm working as a lecturer (or 'assistant professor' in US terminology) at the Computer Science Department at Queen Mary, University of London. I'm a member of the Information Retrieval Group, working with Mounia Lalmas, Thomas Rölleke, and Tassos Tombros. My research interests lie in the area of information access and in particular multi-lingual information access, covering research areas such as Cross-Language Information Retrieval and Statistical Machine Translation.

Here's my somewhat outdated cv.