Curriculum Vitae

Born 1952, I'm married to Eva Bekker-Schmerse; we have one daughter Sanne.

After leaving school at Gymnasium Uhlenhorst Barmbek in Hamburg and after draft I started studying at University of Hamburg. In January 1980 I took a diploma in chemistry and stayed at university as a scientific employee.

After obtaining my doctorate in natural science (Dr.rer.nat.) in 1983 I joined Unilever Research Lab and at first worked as a project manager for synthesis and technical scale production of polymers for medical products. After the research lab was closed by Unilever in 1985 I was taken on by the successor NATEC Institute for Natural Science & Technical Services, where I have been Head of Quality Assurance and of EDP. Since 1996 I am working as a free lance consultant in the fields of quality management and personal computer and network services.

Next to my family and my job my main recreational interests are rowing, PCs, gardening, board games and genealogy. The compilation of the family history Schmerse contains more than 3000 names from the last 500 years - the Schmerses come from the village of Kernein next to Landsberg on Warta river. Since 1966 I am member of Rowing Club Favorite Hammonia in Hamburg, and from time to time I go aboard there on a friday morning at six. I have been active on the executive committee there, too. First contact with data processing in 1975 and constant activities in this field until today led me to experience in dealing with PCs and to knowledge about DOS, Windows, Novell, Basic, Turbo Pascal, Assembler, VisualBasic, HTML, JavaScript, dBase, Wordstar, Word, Excel etc.. as well as to the setup of this home page. At first it was an allotment garden taken over from my parents in Hamburg, that developped from a cursorily interest straight into a passion - since the summer of 1996 we inhabit a residual farm in Meckelstedt (Cuxhaven County in Lower Saxony, Germany),

that gave a new meaning to the term gardening - and that includes riding the lawn tractor as well as working on the old half-timbered barn or oldtimer tractor. A collection of about 400 board games has grown in years - sometimes we play them in the circle of family and friends, but most often they are left behind by computer games!

The work for family history research subsequently led to founding of mailing list Neumark-L for family researcher of Neumark, to membership in Verein für Computergenealogie e.V. and Arbeitsgemeinschaft ostdeutscher Familienforscher e.V. (AGoFF). Within AGoFF I am head of Forschungsstelle Neumark as well as member of the board (Referat Internet).

© 2008 Dr. Gerd C. Schmerse