Marcel Zemp

Welcome to my website!

I'm a Principal Consultant and the Chief Information Security Officer at D ONE in Zurich and work in the areas of data science, analytics, data engineering & data architecture.

In my "previous" life, I was a computational astrophysicist. Check out the section about astrophysics if you want to know more about my past research activities.

I'm also a huge music lover and I'm actively playing the flugelhorn. Currently, I'm also the president of Musikgesellschaft Risch-Rotkreuz. You can learn more details about my musical activities in the music section below.

Last but not least, I'm a proud father of triplets.

Music

I'm a passionate music lover

I love music of nearly all kinds: from classical, jazz, rock, soundtracks to pop. I myself have been playing flugelhorn, cornet and trumpet for more than 30 years. Thus, there is a little bias that I love mainly music that involves some brass.

Currently, I'm playing flugelhorn in Musikgesellschaft Risch-Rotkreuz, a british-style brass band. I was also a member of the Swiss Army Brass Band, one of the elite orchestras of the Swiss army, and the National Youth Brass Band (NJBB) of Switzerland. During Fasnacht season, I played in a Guggemusig (carnival band) called Oohregrööbler. While living abroad, I was playing in several ensembles: the Santa Cruz City Band, the UCSC Wind Ensemble, the Concert Band of the University of Michigan, the Motor City Brass Band, the Five Lakes Silver Band, and the Dodworth Saxhorn Band.

I've performed in venues such as the Auditorium Stravinski in Montreux, the concert hall of the KKL in Lucerne, the Gasteig in Munich, the Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, the DeVos Performance Hall in Grand Rapids, the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto, the Münster in Bern or the Rodahal in Kerkerade.

Check out some clips on YouTube or check out my discography to hear me in action.

Data

I'm a scientist working with data

I have more more than 20 years of experience working with complex data sets. For more than a decade, I was working as a computational astrophysicist with some of the world's largest supercomputers.

As a consultant in the business world, I have extensive experience working on various projects ranging from the banking sector to advertising involving state-of-the-art technologies and techniques.

For more details, have a look at my resume.

Astrophysics

Why is the universe the way it is?

Fundamental and philosophical questions like that lead me to study physics. I wanted to know more about nature and how it works.

I did my doctorate in science at the Institute for Astronomy (now Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics) at ETH Zurich with Marcella Carollo and with Ben Moore at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now Institute for Computational Science) at the University of Zurich. After my doctorate, I spent 2 years in Santa Cruz in a postdoctoral research position (Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship) at the Department for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Then I took another 3 year position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. After 5 years in the United States, I accepted a position as Bairen research professor at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. In 2014, I decided to leave academia and return to my home country, Switzerland.

My main research interests were cosmological structure formation, galaxy formation, dynamics, dark matter, dark energy, cosmology in general, black holes, N-body techniques, integrators, algorithms, data analysis methods and visualisations.

Check out my publication list on ORCID, NASA ADS or Google Scholar to learn more about my research activities.