Dr. Messmer received his Ph.D from the Institute of Astronomy, ETH Zürich, 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 Zürich.

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.