On April 28, Matthias Volk successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled: “Dynamic Fault Trees: Analysis, Semantics, and Applications” for a jury consisting of the external examinar Allessandro Cimatti (FBK Trento, IT), the examiner Wil van der Aalst, supervisor Joost-Pieter Katoen and chairman Stefan Kowalewski. The dissertation provides a formal DFT semantics by means of generalized stochastic Petri nets, proves that this semantics coincides with a simple event trace semantics, and shows that this semantics can be used to treat all existing DFT interpretations. This is complemented with efficient state-space generation techniques for DFTs and novel analysis techniques. The implementation of these techniques show that they outperform existing techniques with orders of magnitude. Two large industrial case studies complete the dissertation.