Roland Kuhn grew up on four continents. He is an Old Cambrian—that is, an alumnus of Nairobi School in Kenya. He has dual Canadian and German nationality. Fluent in English, German, and French, he has varying degrees of familiarity with Japanese, modern Greek, Swahili, and Kanyen’kéha (the Mohawk language). He has a PhD in Computer Science from McGill University and a previous academic background in mathematical biology (undergraduate and Master’s degrees from University of Toronto and University of Chicago, respectively).

He is inventor or co-inventor on 31 US patents. As an undergraduate, he was number CXVII in the succession of a now-banned secret society at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and co-habited for a year with a human skull sacred to the organization. Professionally, he worked as a researcher at the Centre de recherche informatique de Montréal (1992–1996) and at the Panasonic Speech Technology Laboratory in Santa Barbara, California (1996–2004). From 2004 onwards, he was employed by the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, ending up as Principal Research Officer. He retired from NRC in the fall of 2025.

His previous novels are the two-volume dystopian fantasy Apocalypse North and the assassination thriller The Sixth Stage of Dying, both available on Amazon. His H-index is 47 at the time of publication of The Spiky Man—and if you want to find out what an H-index is, read the book!