After finishing my PhD in 1998 at RWTH Aachen under the supervision of Franz Baader, I continued to work in Baader's research group in Aachen and, after 2002, in Dresden, where I completed my habilitation in 2003. In the same year, I started as a Senior Lecturer in the Information Management Group of the Computer Science Department at the University of Manchester, where I am currently a professor.

My general research interests are in logics for knowledge representation and automated deduction. More specifically, I am interested in Description, Modal, and Dynamic Logics, the corresponding inference problems, their complexity, and decision procedures for these problems.

Description Logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms with several nice properties such as high expressive power, well-defined semantics, decidable inference problems, and practicable inference algorithms for these problems. I work on Description Logics as the logical underpinning of ontology languages such as OWL and OWL 2; their usage, for example, in molecular biology; practical inference algorithms for highly expressive Description Logics; and on the complexity of and inference algorithms for Description, Modal, and Dynamic Logics, using e.g., automata-based and tableau-based techniques. Finally, I am interested in investigating a variety of non-standard logical reasoning problems related to ontology engineering, including module extraction and analysis, as well as explaining entailments to ontology engineers.

• Data Science Institute
• Information Management

I am always interested in talking to people who want to pursue a PhD in Description Logics, automated reasoning, or ontology engineering. Please check the School's information on postgraduate research degrees.