Right now, I am working as a visiting professor at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg. A long time ago, I did a masters in Mathematics (with a minor in Theoretical Physics) at the Institute for Mathematical Stochastics of the University of Göttingen. My advisor was Ulrich Krengel. Later on, while working as an insurance mathematician, I got interested in Linguistics (which can be thought of as a sophisticated generalization of Mathematics). In the long run, I did a masters in Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Natural Language Processing of the University of Stuttgart. My advisor was Jürgen Wedekind. After that I started working on statistical NLP at the chairs of Mats Rooth and Christian Rohrer. I finally did a PhD with Mats. Then I moved to Saarbrücken where I was part of Hans Uszkoreit's group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. I also was a part-time lecturer at the Computational Linguistics Department of the Saarland University at that time. After that I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation of the University of Amsterdam, working with Khalil Sima'an and Remko Scha on a project called Learning Stochastic Tree-Grammars from Treebanks.