Growing up in the US and Germany, I fist studied engineering and economics at the University of Karlsruhe, now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. While studying, I worked as consultant at delta e.V. – a student run management consultancy.

Before graduating I spend two years studying in Lausanne, Switzerland. During that time I worked as a research assistant for Professor Christian Zehnder, Chair for Organisational Behaviour and Decision-Making, University of Lausanne, running behavioural experiments on power and decision-making. For my masters thesis I worked with Dr Carina Lomberg at the Chair for Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialisation at the Ecole Polytechniques de Lausanne to investigate optimism and overconfidence in technology startup founders using behavioural experiments.

Interested in understanding why some people decide to start new ventures over and over, I received my PhD at the Behavioural and Clinical Neurosciences Institute at the University of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neurosciences Institute to studying the relationship between impulsive behaviours and decision-making in fast-changing, uncertain environments. Excited about the combination of neuroscience and computational methods, I joined Dr Luke Clark’s and Dr Mike Aitken’s Lab for Affect, Risk and Gambling Experiments for 3 years during my PhD.

After my PhD I joined the Centre for Gambling Research at the University of British Columbia to investigate people’s online gambling behaviour and enjoy the great life in and around Vancouver, BC. The project is focused on identifying people at risk of problem gambling based on their susceptibility to behavioural biases such as the illusion of control or the gambler’s fallacy using a data driven approach und machine learning tools.

I love sports and being outdoors in the mountain or on the water. I have been enjoying to play basketball, soccer and tennis for a very long time. During my time in Lausanne, I started sailing and recently, I have been cycling a lot.