About me

I am a postdoctoral scholar and member of the PTF/ZTF collaboration at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, studying the late stages of stellar evolution and the population of gravitational wave sources in the LISA band, including hot subdwarf binaries, white dwarfs and AM CVn type binaries. Before I move to Santa Barbara I was for more than 2 years a postodoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology. During my time at Caltech I was calibration scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), where I was responsible for the quality assurance of the survey. I am communication coordinator and lead of the Galatic Plane science working group for ZTF. I am also scientific lead of the Fast and the Furious survey, an approved high-cadence survey in the Galactic Plane covering the full inner Plane visible from the Northern hemisphere as part of ZTF.

My enthusiasm in astronomy started already very early in my study. Already as a 2nd year undergraduate student I joined the group of Prof. Dr. Ulrich Heber at the Remeis observatory in Bamberg. As ERASMUS student I spent 3 months at Armagh observatory, Northern Ireland to work on an abundance analysis of extreme helium stars which I continued as Diploma thesis. In May 2011 I started my doctorate at the Department of Astrophysics at the Radboud University Nijmegen on ultracompact AMCVn type binaries supervised by Prof. Dr. Paul Groot which I finished successfully in July 2015.

Before I decdided to study physics I worked three years as industrial mechanic at a mechanical engineering company in Germany.