With his Ph.D. thesis "Randwertproblemmethoden zur Parameteridentifizierung in Systemen nichtlinearer Differentialgleichungen" (Boundary-value problem methods for parameter estimation in systems of nonlinear differential equations) completed under the supervision of Jens Frehse and Roland Z. Bulirsch, he received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Bonn in 1986.
After staying in Heidelberg for two years as a visiting professor for numerical mathematics from 1987 to 1988, he accepted a full professorship at the University of Augsburg.