Postdocs (since 2020)
I am currently based at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville (FL, USA). Together with Arthur Porto, I am developing novel AI-tools for museomics and applying them to large biological datasets.
From 2020 to 2023, I was based at Lund University, where I worked with Erik Svensson on mapping out the phenomics of color polymorphisms in damselflies. This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through an Early Postdoc.mobility fellowship and by the European Commission through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship.
Before coming to Lund, I worked as a short-term postdoc (0.5 year) in Ole Seehausen’s lab at Eawag Kastanienbaum, where I supported investigations into the evolutionary past of Lake Victoria Cichlids.
PhD (2015–2019)
I completed my PhD in Blake Matthews’ lab at Eawag Kastanienbaum, co-supervised by Jukka Jokela, and funded by ETH Zürich’s Center for Adaptation to a Changing Environment. My thesis explored the role of different types of species interactions across various levels of ecological organization and ecological contexts.
An electronic copy of my thesis can be downloaded here.
Undergraduate Studies (2006–2015)
I received both my undergraduate degrees from the University of Oldenburg, where I was based at the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM).
For my Bachelor’s thesis, I worked in the experimental aquaculture lab at the Center for Tropical Marine Ecology in Bremen, Germany, investigating the effects of multiple stressors on scleractinian corals. My thesis was supervised by Andreas Kunzmann.
For my Master’s thesis, I went abroad to California, investigating coexistence patterns of seagrass mesograzers in the Stachowicz lab at Bodega Marine Laboratory, UC-Davis.
Pre-Science
I am originally from Mülheim an der Ruhr in NRW, Germany, where I attended Gymnasium Broich. A high-school exchange program (2002–2003) in West Palm Beach (FL, USA) introduced me to Marine Biology through a class with Mr. Marshall, which reinforced my decision to pursue a career in science.