Guido Kanschat studied mathematics at the University of Bonn. In 1992 he moved to Heidelberg University, where he received his doctor of science degree in 1996 and his habilitation in 2004. He spent the academic year 1999/2000 as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, and between 2006 and 2012 served as Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor at Texas A&M University. In 2012 he joined the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) of Heidelberg University holding the chair for Mathematical Methods of Simulation. Since 2014, he is Associate Dean for Teaching.
Guido Kanschat works in the fields of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, in particular analysis and implementation of finite element methods. Here, he focuses on applications of Discontinuous Galerkin Methods to applications in radiative transport and coupled flow problems. His work involves the development and analysis of discretization schemes as well as efficient multigrid solvers and their implementation.
He is coauthor and one of the founders of the deal.II software project, which provides Open Source infrastructure for finite element calculations. He was awarded the 2007 Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for this project together with Wolfgang Bangerth and Ralf Hartmann. He is founding editor of the Archive of Numerical Software and a strong advocate for Open Source Software and the recognition of the intellectual achievement in numerical software.