I started studying Physics at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Following my "Vordiplom" I spent a year at the University of Southampton in the UK as an exchange student. After returning to Germany I completed my Diploma in Physics at the University of Heidelberg, where I got a first glimpse of particle physics by working on the ALEPH experiment at the LEP collider and where I was given the opportunity to spend 6 months at CERN.
I returned to the UK for my PhD at Royal Holloway University of London working on the BaBar experiment at SLAC, Stanford, measuring the CKM matrix element |Vcb| and the b-quark and charm-quark masses. Following three more years on BaBar at RHUL as a PPARC postdoctoral fellow I went to CERN to work first on ATLAS and then at CMS on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Since the start of operations at the LHC I have been searching for signs of production of supersymmetric and dark matter particles in proton-proton collisions ranging from 7 TeV to 13 TeV centre-of-mass energy. My current research focus is on searching for decays of the Higgs boson to dark matter particles.
More recently I have also joined the LUX-ZEPLIN direct dark matter detection experiment that will search for galactic dark matter interactions in 7t of liquid xenon, located a mile underground in the former Homestake gold mine at the SURF laboratory in South Dakota.