During this time he was the coordinator of the project "Stochastic Analysis and systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom" July 1987 to December 1996.

For this work he received the 1993 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Since 1996, he has been director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig.

In 2002, there, he initiated with two other scientists from the Max Planck Institute, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioinformatics (IZBI).

In 1986 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley (Two dimensional geometric variational problems).