His broad background in high-performance and scientific computing includes Grid computing, parallel computing, algorithms for managing memory hierarchies, linear algebra library software, and ill-posed eigenvalue problems. He is co-winner of the SIAM Linear Algebra Prize 2000, for the most outstanding linear algebra publication world-wide during the preceding 3-year period. He currently leads the Grid computing research (www.gird.se) at Umeå University.

International experiences include a year at NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA.

Erik is member of the Swedish Research Council's Committee for Research Infrastructures (KFI) and Vice Chair of its expert group on e-science. He has also been appointed by the Nordic Council of Ministers for writing a Nordic eScience stratey in 2007 and a corresponding Nordic-Baltic eScience strategy in 2009.