About me
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