Juniorprofessor

I grew up in a rural area in the north west of Germany. West Germany, actually, as it was called back then. International people might have heard of Hermann the German – that’s the tribesman that vanquished the Romans in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest. To commemorate Hermann’s stopping the spread of a more developed civilization, the Germans errected a gigantic statue around where I lived. It is rather pretty.

Educationally, I first made a large tour through Germany before going abroad. I briefly studied in Marburg to become a high school teacher in physics and history, but abandoned that endeavour to get a B.Eng in Microtechnology in Zwickau. Having been exposed to cutting edge solar cell research at the Fraunhofer IPMS in Dresden, I then went to study Nanotechnology as M.Sc in Erlangen – with a memorable Erasmus term in Linköping (Sweden). Ever since I have loved being around international people.

Coming from a working class family, I did not even know what a university really was when I finished school – let alone what doctors do if they don’t practice medicine. It has thus never really been my plan to get anywhere specific with my studies and I certainly never considered getting a doctorate.

I almost managed to go abroad for my doctorate. In the end, I did a super-exciting binational doctorate in Groningen (Netherlands) and Erlangen. That allowed me to have a foot in two research groups and it exposed me to a lof of different topics at the same time. It also awoke my calling to become a spectroscopist.

Travelling back and forth a lot was exciting and nice for my parents (because my home town lies in between those two cities), but it was also exhausting. I thus stayed on in Groningen for a first postdoc before moving over to Cambridge – just in time for Brexit to take effect and for a very long Covid lockdown. Great fun!

At the end of May 2023 was appointed assistant professor for Experimental Semiconductor Physics Chemnitz University of Technology, and I am currently transitioning my centre of mass from Cambridge back to Germany.