Received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 1988. He then spent two years at MIT in the Laboratory for Computer Science and one year at the Juelich supercomputing center. From 1991 he is member of the computer science Department at the University of Geneva, where he was appointed professor in 2001.

His main research interest is the modeling and simulation of complex systems, High Performance Computing, metaheuristics for optimization, biomedical applications,  and multiscale methods and algorithms. An important research direction if the  development and the application of the cellular automata approach and the lattice Boltzmann method.