Dr. Mathias Bernhard is a Research Associate at PSL. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Before that, he was a postdoc at Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich. He holds a Doctor of Sciences (Dr. sc.) in Architecture from ETH Zurich. His thesis, “Domain Transforms in Architecture – Encoding and Decoding of Cultural Artefacts,” draws a map of the variegated field of CAD and investigates the implications of alternative models of abstraction and their creative potential. He is an architect with a profound specialization in computational design, digital fabrication, and information technology. He is particularly interested in how artifacts can be encoded, made machine-readable, and digitally operational. His research focuses on what computational design instruments can fully harvest the potential of recent developments in digital fabrication, more specifically, additive manufacturing. He is the developer of various volumetric modeling packages that employ function representation and signed distance fields as an alternative to the more widely known boundary representation for three-dimensional geometry.