Martin H. Trauth studied geophysics and geology at the University of Karlsruhe. He obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Kiel in 1995 and then became a permanent member of the scientific staff at the University of Potsdam. Following his habilitation in 2003 he became a lecturer, and then in 2011 a titular professor at the University of Potsdam. Since 1990 he has worked on various aspects of past changes in the climates of East Africa and South America. His projects have aimed to understand the role of the tropics in terminating ice ages, the relationship between climatic changes and human evolution, and the influence that climate anomalies had on mass movements in the central Andes. Each of these projects has involved the use of MATLAB to apply numerical and statistical methods (such as time-series analysis and signal processing) to paleoclimate time series, lake-balance modeling, stochastic modeling of bioturbation, age-depth modeling of sedimentary sequences,or the processing of satellite and microscope images. Martin H. Trauth has been teaching a variety of courses on data analysis in earth sciences with MATLAB for more than 25 years, both at the University of Potsdam and at other universities around the world.