Personal Details

Name: Thorsten R. E. Christiansson

Date of Birth: June 15, 1973 (Stockholm, Sweden)

Nationality: Swedish (Swiss naturalization in progress)

Marital Status: Married, two children

Residential Status: Permis C (Resident in Switzerland since January 2000)

Professional experience (more info)

Creative Electronic Systems (CES), Geneva, Switzerland (Sept. 2000 - present): Currently working as 'Senior Software Engineer' in the R&D department of CES, a Swiss company which designs single-board (VME/cPCI/PMC) real-time computers based on PowerPCs and custom-made FPGAs. Directly involved in the development and verification of new products, and development of board-monitors and test suites, working mainly in a linux/emacs/gcc environment, writing C and Assembler code. Considerable laboratory time working with bus analysers, logic analysers and oscilloscopes. I also spend a lot of time writing shell-, perl- and tcl- scripts to automate tasks. I'm also involved in documentation and customer relations, particularly in reproducing and solving customer problems.

Medical Control, Geneva, Switzerland (Jan 2000 - Aug 2000): R&D Engineer at MCSA, a small (now defunct) company founded on a unique product which measured the depth of anaesthesia by fractal analysis of the ECG-signal. Responsible for maintenance of the product and development of what would have been its successor. This also involved development of numerous small windows-apps to record the data from this and other medical devices written mainly in C and TCL/TK.

Kraftelektronik, Göteborg, Sweden (Aug 1999 - Jan 2000): R&D Engineer at Kraftelektronik, working on the design of a new control system for advanced rectifiers, involving equal proportions of hardware and software design.

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland (Oct 1997 - Dec 1998): I completed my thesis work at CERN. This is normally a theoretical study, lasting less than six months, but I was given the opportunity to extend this in order to carry out the actual experiments in the laboratory.

Summer jobs: During my time at university and before I have taken the opportunity to go abroad and practise my language skills. I have worked in a British software company as well as a German laboratory and a Dutch mechanical workshop.

Formal Education: (more info)

University of Linköping, Sweden: MSc in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, specialising in applied physics (1992 - 1998)

Thesis work, CERN, Geneva: Evaluation of a new detector design (1997 - 1998)

Military service: 10 months education as telegraphist at S2 and I15 (Sweden) (1994-1995)

Secondary school: Nils-Ericssonskolan, Trollhättan, Sweden, specialising in electronics and physics (1989-1992)

Language courses: Two month intensive course in French at CIDEF, Angers, France (1997)

Technical German at University of Linköping (1996)

Computers & Electronics: (more info)

Computers: In 1982 my parents bought their first computer, and I have been brought up with PCs. Currently at CES I use a Linux/emacs environment to code and compile, and Windows/office to write documentation.

Electronics: I have always been surrounded by electronics, and I am comfortable in a laboratory environment. I have used several kinds of oscilloscopes, signal generators and data acquisition systems.

Language skills: (more info)

Swedish - Mother tongue.

English - Excellent, written and spoken.

French - Oral fluent; Written good

German - Good understanding (written and oral).

Dutch - Basic understanding.

Other interests: (more info)

Sports: I have always enjoyed skiing, in my childhood mainly cross-country, and more recently down-hill and telemark. When there's no snow I like to cycle. I have a road bike on which I try to log at least 2000km per year. Apart from my family, my main interests are history and literature.