Credit: IBM Research

Cristiano Malossi works at the IBM Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland. He won an IBM Research Prize for his PhD thesis in 2013 and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize two years later. He has used his mathematical skills to model blood flow, design aircraft, simulate convection in Earth's mantle and improve energy efficiency in high-performance computing.

Did you always want to work in industry?

I did my bachelor's and master's degrees studying aerospace, and my PhD in applied mathematics. Since the beginning of my studies, I was oriented towards a job in a company with high impact on technology. I wanted to see my work applied towards real products and services. The problems you solve in academia are generally more fundamental and long term; in a business environment, you are exposed to many different ones every day, and you are asked to get them solved almost as soon as you get them. This drives you to learn a lot of different things, very fast.

How did you find the perfect position?

At the end of my PhD, I didn't have time to send out CVs, and my professor said, 'if you want to stay as a postdoc, we welcome you', and so I stayed. I invested six months in sending out the best possible CVs to find the place I wanted to work. When you compete for the most prestigious positions, you can't send the application after half a day of working on it.

How did applying for prizes aid your search?

You show that you have high targets and that you are a great teamworker. Even if you don't win, the fact that you participated shows that you are motivated and that you want to do more than what is expected from you, which is what many companies are looking for. And I must admit, I was lucky; winning the IBM research prize for my PhD thesis on algorithms that allow patient-specific simulations of blood flow in the arteries was a strong way to get in touch with the people here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. See go.nature.com/li3gbs for more.