Christian is passionate about education and inspiring young minds to see computers as "think tools." Christian likes to bring people together and foster interdisciplinary and intercultural teams.

Christian received his Ph.D. in Informatics (Computer Science) from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. In July 1999, he joined the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary. Since August 2003, Christian holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in the Cumming School of Medicine, where he was the Director of Bioinformatics in the Bachelor of Health Sciences Program from 2005 to 2018.

Christian leads the Evolutionary & Swarm Design (ESD) research group in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Jacob and his team of students are investigating how to apply augmented, evolutionary, swarm and collective intelligence techniques to various application domains. The ESD research group has built mathematical models, computer simulations and visualizations of traffic systems, army ants, neuron growth, bio-molecular systems, and gene regulatory systems. Some of the projects are described in detail at the ESD website: http://www.swarm-design.org.

Currently, Christian is leading the LINDSAY Virtual Human project, which originated in 2005 from a collaboration with Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) in the Cumming School of Medicine.

Combining augmented intelligence, spatial computing, and agent-based modeling, the LINDSAY Virtual Human team is using game development engines (such as Unreal Engine) to develop digital worlds to build cinematic models of biological systems that illustrate human physiology. The objective is to create explorable, interactive virtual Body Universes to experience the wonders of the human body in a "Magic Schoolbus" story telling style — from proteins and cells to organs and systems.

In addition to more than 100 research papers, Christian has written two books on evolutionary computing and natural programming paradigms: Principia Evolvica (dpunkt, Heidelberg, 1997; in German) and Illustrating Evolutionary Computation with Mathematica (Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2001).