Christophe Pascal is professor for structural geology at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He received an initial education in theoretical physics before studying geosciences. In 1998, he defended a PhD thesis in quantitative tectonics supervised by Prof Jacques Angelier, one of the most renowned specialists in paleostress inversion techniques. He has successively worked at the Free University, Amsterdam, as post-doc fellow, and at the Geological Survey of Norway as senior researcher. All along his scientific career, he has focused on the use and development of quantitative approaches to investigate tectonic problems.