Dr. Messmer received his Ph.D from the Institute of Astronomy, ETH Z�rich, Switzerland. Dr. Messmer's research interests and skills include numerical plasma physics and its application to astronomy, parallel and distributed computing, algorithms, software tools and applications, grid technologies and Web technologies. Dr. Messmer was a research assistant for the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing and the Institute of Astronomy in Z�rich.

He is expert in various computing languages, including Fortran, C++, Java and Perl as well as IDL and AVS. Dr. Messmer has conducted numerous computing projects, including large-scale plasma simulations on a Beowulf-Cluster, parallelization of a PIC plasma simulation code, and vectorization of a Beam-Propagation code.