I have been teaching advanced physical chemistry (both lab courses and lectures), mathematics, and structural chemistry at the University of Vienna for many years. I have received formal training in pedagogics for teachers at the University of Vienna, where in 1998 I received my Venia Docendi (Habilitation), which is a required credential to teach at a university, and to be able to issue Ph.D. theses and supervise Ph.D. (graduate) students. My academic habilitation was externally and internationally reviewed (G.Sheldrick, Goettingen; C.W.Carter, Chapel Hill, USA; W.Sänger, Berlin; C.Kratky, Graz; and O.Steinhauser, Vienna). I offer courses in biomolecular crystallography twice a year in Vienna, and held an advanced crystallography course in spring 2002 and 2004 at Texas A&M University. In addition to classroom teaching, I have developed a web-based tutorial in crystallography (http://www.ruppweb.org/), which has been visited by over 500,000 students and scientists who extensively use the CGI based applications I developed. This site, developed in my spare time, has been repeatedly acknowledged by the National Academy of Science committee on crystallographic education and the American Crystallographic Association, where I am a member of the 2005 education summit panel. To pursue further extension of the web tutorial, I participate in distance learning and remote access proposals as well as NSF sponsored crystallography workshops. In addition, I am a lecturer at the EMBL Course on Protein Purification, Expression and Crystallization (II -V) and have organized a crystallization workshop at the Institute for Brain Research at the Medial University of Vienna. I serve as a facilitator in several crystallography short courses (macromolecular and small molecules) offered by Dr. Katherine Kantardjieff, Director of the W. M. Keck Center for Molecular Structure at CSUF. See my teaching web site for a list of recent workshops.
I have been contracted by Taylor and Francis to write a modern, web-assisted protein crystallography textbook 'Modern Biomolecular Crystallography' with special consideration of the tight interaction between protein engineering, crystallographic structure analysis and bioinformatics. I have financial commitments from the publisher and from commercial X-ray instrumentation vendors for support of an enhanced teaching web site accompanying the text book. The funds should be sufficient to employ graduate students for a continuous update of contents and the operational maintenance of the server. I enjoy working with students (poster awards), which was a special reason for me to spend my sabbatical year 2002-2003 at Texas A&M University. Several former post-docs from my lab have now accomplished careers at academic institutions or in industry.
Student evaluation forms of 'Introduction to protein crystallography'. My lecture in Vienna was randomly selected for lecture quality assessment in WS2002. All 4 students participated (Evaluation 1, 2, 3, 4)
Other instructional activities: I am also a FAA Certified Flight Instructor, single and multi-engine land and sea, and hold a Powerplant and Airframe Mechanic licence. I volunteered as a MedEvac pilot and I am a type rated CE-500 and B-737 Airline Pilot who survived giving over 2000 hours of advanced flight instruction through my company (Vienna Air International) in intense training situations in complex multiengine aircraft. I also received extensive Command, Leadership and Resource (CRL) training in addition to my work related management training courses.