Originally from Germany, I graduated with a BSc in chemistry from Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg. In the following year, I worked as a graduate exchange student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. My research at UNC focused on understanding the structural basis of the HIV-1 RNA frame-shift mechanism using SHAPE-MaP technology.

I am currently a graduate student at Columbia University with a joint PhD appointment in the Bussemaker and Mann labs. My research interest is to investigate the influence of DNA sequence identity, as well as epigenetic marks on DNA shape and transcription factor (TF) binding. Developing new high-throughout functional genomics tools at single nucleotide resolution, we hope to obtain detailed quantitative insight on how specific TF complexes read out DNA shape and thus fine-tune gene expression in the context of normal development and disease.