He received a BS in mathematics from the Technical University of Berlin in 1987 and his Master degree from the MIT Media Lab in 1990. After working for Thinking Machines Corporation on massively parllel graphics algorithms he studied computer graphics under Pat Hanrahan at Princeton Unviversity and received his PhD in 1994 for research on wavelet based algorithms for illumination computations. Most recently he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of South Carolina under the direction of Björn Jawerth.