Univ.-Prof. Dr. Volker Michel

Professor Michel studied industrial mathematics (Technomathematik) at the University of Kaiserslautern and received his diploma in 1995. Afterwards, he was scholarship holder in the DFG funded research training group "Technomathematik" and later a research associate (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the same university, where he received his PhD in mathematics in 1999. For his thesis, he was awarded a prize by the foundation of the Kreissparkasse Kaiserslautern. Until his habilitation in 2002, he was employed as a research fellow (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at his university. Subsequently, he remained at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kaiserslautern as a lecturer (Hochschuldozent) and as an acting professor in the local Geomathematics Group.

In 2007, 2008, and 2011, he followed invitations for longer stays at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INIMS) respectively the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge, UK. Further invitations as a visiting scholar led him, for example, to Princeton University, JPL from NASA at Caltech, University of Orlando (Florida), Université Côte d'Azur and the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM) in Linz. 

From 1 October 2008, he had been professor for mathematics in engineering at the University of Siegen. From March 2014 to March 2016, he was the speaker of the Department of Mathematics. Since November 2025, he has been professor for geomathematics at the University of Siegen. The Geomathematics Group Siegen was founded by him and is led by him.

Professor Michel has supervised numerous third-party fund projects (mostly by the DFG) and more than a dozen PhD theses. Moreover, he organised several conferences, minisymposia etc, e.g. on inverse problems and on geomathematics.

He was and is a member of several editorial boards of scientific journals. Since 2019, he has also been an editor-in-chief of the "International Journal on Geomathematics" (hosted by Springer Nature).

The core of his research concentrates on the development and enhancement of mathematical methods which are applied in Earth sciences. This also results in projects on related problems, e.g. in medical imaging and the simulation of industrial manufacturing processes. The breadth of his scientific work comprises theoretical foundations and modellings as well as the research on numerical methods including their application to real data. Keywords are: integral and differential equations, inverse problems, regularisation, wavelet methods, spline methods, dictionary-based methods.

For several years, science communication has become another key aspect of his work. This includes annual Rose Monday lectures, Days of Mathematics as well as invited lectures and his book "Wozu braucht man eigentlich Mathematik?" (what is mathematics actually good for?).

Please note: this is the official website of Volker Michel as a scientist at the University of Siegen; if you are looking for his (German) private website, please go to www.volker-michel.de.