About myself  

I worked for most of my career as a university teacher and researcher, but since last year I switched careers and became a technical writer for a software company that writes Java programs for corporate and industrial information systems. This shift is less drastic than it seems - I am using the very same skills that I developed for learning and communicating in science, only for a different purpose. A large part of my academic work was in connection with software development, so I don't feel I have changed to a new field. The real difference is that now I am working in conditions far better than I was used to in universities. I am still doing research as a hobby and I might take temporary research fellowships in other countries now and then, like I used to do earlier in my career, but at present I have no plans to permanently return to an academic workplace.

Judging from the choice of journals and books in which I publish my scientific research papers, I am a palaeobiologist (or palaeontologist, if you prefer the older term). However, my research lies at the borderline between palaeobiology and biology, or could be regarded more properly as biology. This stems from my conviction that fossils, being the remains of living organisms, cannot be treated as distinct from the latter. My preferred research fields are the functional morphology of the invertebrate skeleton and the morphogenetic and constructional processes used by invertebrates to build their skeletal structures. I work mostly on bivalves and gastropods, but I published also on brachyuran and anomuran decapods, stomatopods, inarticulate brachiopods, serpulid polychaetes, insects, symbioses that involve marine invertebrates and, lately, even some of the very early, problematic Ediacara-type fossil organisms (which in my opinion we still don't really understand, nor know exactly what they were).

My professional interests in computers and programming include a long affair with C++ (mostly Visual Studio for Windows native GUI applications) and, recently, Java. My favourite OS is Windows XP.  

I also have a long work experience as an IT manager in a university environment, and two professional certifications in networking. On this web site, I provide a few pages about privacy and cryptography in connection with personal computers and the Internet.

An additional interest of mine is photography, especially macrophotography in connection with my research in palaeobiology, and macro, nature and bird photography, mainly as a hobby. This site contains several pages on my interests in photography.