Dance Education

MarkusM has practised (competitive) ballroom dancing for many years. He was very lucky to have had several teachers of the first water. In the Latin American dances, these include Franco Formica and mainly Oksana Nikiforova and Evgenij Voznyuk and in the Standard dances, Lasse Ödegaard, Pia David, Stefan Ossenkopp and Marcus Weiss and Isabel Edvardsson.
Through a concentration on the "smal" (say being on one leg), MarkusM came to letting the "large" happen (say a step). In this way, he considers choreographies as the highest form of improvisation.

Furthermore, MarkusM performed in leading parts in various ballet performances in a dance theater fashion. These stagings usually were guest performances in Staatstheater Kassel or part of Kultursommer Nordhessen.

Other Background

Apart from ballroom dancing, MarkusM studies Feldenkrais, Shiatsu, Qigong, Contact Improvisation and some contemporary dance. Based on all these experiences, he developed and lead several dance research classes in the fashion of Sensation Through Dance or one-to-one dance consultations.

Additionally, MarkusM is researching on interaction of movement and voice in the context of classical singing education. One particular interest is how to be present in the sense of your voice. This soon shall further influence happenings at eMotion.

Mathematical Education, Research and Teaching

MarkusM studied mathematics at the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, minoring in theoretical physics. He spent a study abroad at the University of Leicester, UK, and graduated with a diploma in mathematics. In his diploma theses, he dealt with the POD Method, a model reduction technique used in the context of optimal control of partial differential equations.

Since Fall 2008, MarkusM researches on the POD method on a PhD level at the Institute for Mathematics at the University of Graz, Austria. In particular, MarkusM deals with the convergence of the socalled OS-POD algorithm and and its applications to a "FitzHugh-Nagumo" Model. This model presents the absolutely simplest case of a monodomain model to mathematically model the activity of the human heart. The latter is used in its full beauty in the subproject "Virtual Heart" of the SFB "Mathematiclal Optimization and Application to Biomdeical Sciences" at Graz.

In Göttingen, MarkusM has conducted tutorials on basic numerical mathematics for several semesters. His focus was to develop schemes which would help students to give clean presentations of their weekly work in small teams.

At Graz, MarkusM has conducted a proseminar on introductory higher mathematics for one semester. Also, he supervised high school students during the so-called modeling week.
While being in high school himself, MarkusM created several programs for the then-new calculator TI-89. A corresponding webpage is still in existence.