Jo's Website: My Life

How It All Began

My personal story started in 1963 with my birth in Gelsenkirchen.

After that I first scouted the nearer surrounding but from 1969 on my freedom of movement was radically decreased due the elementary school I had to visit from then on. After that the situation got even worse. The comprehensive school took even more of my time so I was glad to end it with university entrance qualification in 1982. From then on the dark time of military service cut 15 months out of my live. (I never really understood why I didn't refuse. Everything else would have been better. Not even the experience was worth that.)

From autumn '83 I studied at Ruhr-Universität Bochum to become an electrical engineer. Here the training from comprehensive school paid off. In my opinion the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology really is recommendable. But by now all my professors already have retired. I specialized in electronic circuits and measurement and in electrical energy engineering. I always thought - as many students - electrical energy engineering was boring. But by chance I noticed that this institute was looking for someone to implement a new operating system. And working there I found out that there really are a lot of interesting problems in this area. You just aren't told in the basic lessons ;-).

That way I ended up as a Ph.D. student with a job as a scientific coworker at the Institute for Generation and Application of electrical Energy. There I did research on this and that and in 1995 I wrote my Ph.D. thesis: "Increasing of Current Utilisation of High-Power Inverters for Traction Drives with Direct Selfcontrol (DSC)" (Erhöhung der Stromausnutzung von Hochleistungswechselrichtern für Traktionsantriebe mit direkter Selbstregelung (DSR)). That was: I showed a way to put a turbo supercharger into an electric locomotive (about 20% more torque) by just changing the software that controls the drive. Of course I didn't do that alone by myself. My Examiner Prof. Dr.-Ing. M. Depenbrock and the new head of the institute Prof. Dr.-Ing. A. Steimel as well as my colleagues and several students supported me. I want to take the chance to again tell them "thank you" this way. Who is interested in the text of my Ph.D. thesis will find it as No. 534 in Reihe 8, Meß-, Steuerung- und Regelungstechnik of the Fortschrittberichte of the VDI Verlag (ISBN: 3-18-353408-8).

Besides this I developed - first for the institute only, later for external customers, too - the simulation software DIXI and the corresponding data analyzing software Dixiplot.

After Ph.D. I worked in several companies.

Meanwhile I met a young women in a chat room and fell in love. That's why I moved to Aachen.

In 2002 I became an independent contractor and now sell my knowledge as an electrical engineer. But I still have some Hobbies ;-). And I am involved with Scientists for Future Aachen!