On 1st August, not only Benedikt Ehinger but also Marco Oesting took up his SimTech tenure-track professorship at the University of Stuttgart. He will work in the field of "Computational Statistics". We will introduce him briefly today.
Mr. Oesting, perhaps you could briefly introduce yourself. Where do you come from? What have you been doing up until now?
My name is Marco Oesting and I am a mathematician. Coming from the Osnabrücker Land, I studied at the University of Göttingen where I received my doctorate. After postdoctoral positions in Germany and abroad, my last position was at the University of Siegen.
You are a mathematician. What are your main areas of expertise? And in which direction have you done research so far?
My focus is on stochastics and statistics. I am especially interested in modelling rare, extreme events and their spatial structure. This involves asking questions such as "What does a heavy rain event look like that occurs on average once in 100 years? What is the typical size of an area affected by it?" Besides the development of suitable statistical models and methods to adapt them to data, complex simulations also play a major role.
What are your plans and goals with the professorship?
I am looking forward to setting up a working group and working with them on interesting and challenging problems. There are exciting statistical questions in many application fields. I hope to get to know many of them and to establish new cooperations.
Which will be the main topics?
Technical progress gives us access to a constantly growing amount of different data. Developing methods and models to analyze them and to represent the underlying processes will be an important focus of our work. It will be a matter of extracting the relevant information from the high-dimensional data and of recording structures. Building on my previous research interests, I am particularly interested in extreme value behaviour in space and time. A key question is how one can benefit from the ever increasing spatial and temporal resolution in its modelling.
What do you expect from the cooperation within and with SimTech?
In SimTech there is a great deal of expertise in handling large amounts of data and computationally intensive procedures. Here researchers with different technical backgrounds come together. I hope to be able to contribute here, learn a lot of new things and work in an interdisciplinary way - there are certainly more than enough interesting and relevant questions. Besides the technical environment SimTech also offers good infrastructural possibilities, such as access to the necessary computing resources to process and analyse high-dimensional data sets.
Why did you decide on the University of Stuttgart?
The university offers an attractive location: In addition to interesting cooperation possibilities both within and outside the faculty, the already mentioned possibilities of SimTech are also available. For someone with my professional interests this is a great environment.
Will you offer seminars or lectures in the winter semester?
Yes, I am going to offer a new lecture on "Stochastic Simulation" - I think this is an interesting topic that can be helpful in solving problems in various fields. I am already excited about it and hope to attract many students with it.
Have you ever been to Stuttgart? Do you know the city?
In fact, I was here for the first time during the application process. This makes it all the more exciting for me to explore the city and its surroundings.
What are you excited about?
I am looking forward to getting to know a lot of new things: interesting people, beautiful places and professionally exciting questions.
What did you want to become as a little boy?
If we restrict ourselves to the serious career aspirations: I was interested in the banking and insurance sector quite early. In a way, even then I was not that far away from my current interests: The question of the extent of an extreme event is not only socially relevant, but in its economic consequences it is also interesting and important for insurance companies, especially reinsurance companies.
Quickly asked
Movie or book? Book
Mountains or beach? Beach
Champagne or sparkling water? Sparkling water
Watch sports or do sports? Honestly...watch sports
Car or bike? Recently mainly car, hopefully soon more bike again
Cat or dog? So far I had neither of them, but rather cat
Cinema or concert? Both are good
Early riser or night owl? More like early risers
Greta or Donald? Greta