Michael Afanasiev is currently working on his PhD in Geophysics. He became interested in programming and high performance computing during his BSc in Computational Physics, playing around with simulations of star formation. After a brief attempt to lead a roguish and exciting lifestyle as a field Geophysicist, he was brought back to the keyboard during a MSc, where he began working on full waveform inversion (FWI). In 2013 he moved to Switzerland to continue working on FWI as a PhD student at ETH Zurich, where he’s currently wrapping things into a thesis. He spends most of his time writing scientific software, wandering through the alps, and atoning for the times he repeated the mantra “Fortran is the best language for scientific computing.”