About me

Daniel on top of Nevado Pisco (5765 m) in the Cordillera Blanca (Peru) with Huandoy Sur (6160 m), Huandoy (6395 m) and Huandoy Este (6070 m) in the background

Climbing

Growing up in Dresden (Germany) I began rock climbing in the mid-nineties in Saxon Switzerland National Park just south of Dresden. When I moved to Seattle in 1999 I enjoyed the mountains of the Pacific Northwest hiking for a few years. But soon I wanted to venture into higher elevations and sought some formal instruction in general mountaineering. So I joined the Seattle Mountaineers, took their Basic Climbing Course in 2003, and started the Intermediate Climbing Course a year later. Learning about safe travel on a glacier and climbing steep snow and ice opened up a whole new world beyond the realm of rock climbing for me. With the Mountaineers and friends from the University of Washington's Climbing Club I enjoyed exploring the high mountains of the Pacific Northwest for a couple of years.

In 2004 I moved back to Europe and now live in Switzerland at the door step of the Western Alps. For the past few years I have had the pleasure of exploring this diverse and amazing mountain range while climbing, skiing, and hiking.

These are a few of my climbing friends:

Professional

I received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Washington where I worked on research in theoretical Nuclear and Particle Physics, in particular on chiral perturbation theory (the low-energy effective theory of Quantum Chromodynamics) and its application for lattice QCD simulations. I have also done work in astrophysics by using supernovae observations to calculate limits on beyond-the-standard-model physics, for example, on the size of extra dimensions or on the axion decay constant. Here is a list of my publications from SPIRES.

Nowadays my interest has turned toward quantitative methods in finance. I studied Mathematical Finance at the University of Oxford and finished the program with an MSc degree. Today I work in the banking industry.

Contact

Do you have a question or suggestion? Please feel free to contact me at darndt@gmail.com.

January 2015