As a PhD-student of the GFZ Potsdam and the FU Berlin I am involved in the DESIRE project in Jordan and Israel. My main duties are collecting magnetotelluric (MT) data along the geophysical profiles, processing the data and finally developing conductivity models for the subsurface of the Dead Sea Basin.

At the moment I am trying to find out the 2D conductivity distribution of the region by following different inversion strategies and comparing the obtained models with other geophysical results and existing geological information. Because of the complex geological setting of the region, 3D modelling will be required to explain the measured data. This point leads me to my main area of interest.

In 3D modelling we are dealing with large equation systems that must be solved to obtain the desired physical quantities. By applying standard equation system solvers, this can take several hours or even days. One way to overcome such time consuming calculations is to parallelize the problem using several processors in a computer cluster. Existing parallel codes require a lot of communication between processors to exchange information which can also be time consuming. One way to avoid this communication is to modify the calculation scheme, so that each processor works independent of the others. At the moment I am trying to develop this idea by solving the 2D forward modelling problem using a LU-decomposition scheme. Later, I will try to apply it to the 3D forward modelling problem.

Apart from my interest in resolving deep structures using MT, I am also interested in shallow structures by using DC-geoelectric method. In my diploma theses (Cologne University, Germany), I developed and coded integrated methods to invert and analyze DC-geoelectric data in 1D and 2D. This software was applied to an archaeological site. Once I finish stabilizing the 2D solution, I am planning to extend my previous code to deal with 3D problems.