He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Paderborn, Germany. He received the German Software Engineering Award in 2000 and was awarded a fellowship of the Advanced Systems Institute of British Columbia. In 2005 and 2006, he was a visiting professor in the UBC department of family medicine. He has over five years of experience with engineering medical information systems. He has been the technical lead of two open source projects in this domain (www.opentapas.org and www.egadss.org). He is a member of the AMIA, HL7, ACM, and IEEE CS and Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).