Taras Gerya was awarded a Ph.D. in 1990 from the Moscow State University and went on to become a Senior Researcher and Head of the Laboratory of Metamorphism at the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He was awarded a Habilitation in petrology before moving to the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany in 2000 as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow. In 2004 he took up a position as Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, while continuing to be an Adjunct Professor in the Geology Department of Moscow State University. He was awarded a Habilitation in numerical geodynamic modelling by ETH-Zurich in 2008 and the Golden Owl Prize 2008 from ETH students for teaching of continuum mechanics and numerical geodynamic modelling. Dr Gerya is the author of over 50 papers on geodynamic modelling in leading peer-review journals.