Dr. Meese received his siv.ing.-degree in industrial mathematics from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1991. He then received a position as research assistent at the department of Hydro and Gas Dynamics, NTH. He was accepted for the dr.ing.-program in 1992, with Associate Professor Skjalg Haaland as supervisor. In december 1998 he defended the thesis «Numerical Methods for the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations on Unstructured Grids».

In the fall of 1996 and spring of 1997 he was granted a leave from the university to do his compulsory military service. During this time, he was stationed at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment with the research group for aero-structures, working on computer codes for the generation of semi-structured grid.

Ernst A. Meese was starting as a scientist at CFD norway as of September 14, 1998.