About me
I grew up in the small German town of Jena in the state of Thuringia. With the Zeiss company headquarters located in town and its famous Planetarium, I was probably predisposed for a career in astronomy.
I obtained my Masters in Physics at The Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. I used Hubble Space Telescope archival data to search for extra-solar planets around nearby stars. Before I saw the light that is Python, I used IRAF to write a now long forgotten package to obtain detection limits in HST data.
Ralph Neuhaeuser later offered me a position as PhD student in his group in Jena. During the course of my studies I used the NACO adaptive optics instrument at the ESO Very Large Telescope to follow the orbit of known directly imaged planets and brown dwarfs around nearby stars. Even though the their orbits are often hundreds of years long, it was possible to constrain inclination and eccentricity of some systems and speculate about their formation history.
Having completed my PhD in 2012 I took a postdoc position in Jena, to study the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars together with Markus Mugrauer. In 2014, I moved to Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands to work with Christoph Keller and Matthew Kenworthy on the commissioning and scientific exploitation of the SPHERE extreme adaptive optics system. In 2018 I went to work with Carsten Dominik, the leader of the circumstellar disk research group of the SPHERE consortium, at the University of Amsterdam. My current research focus is scattered light imaging of circumstellar disks in the near infrared as well as complementary observations across the wavelength spectrum, and radiative transfer modelling. I also remain on the lookout for the occasional planet :)
Home away from home during the course of my PhD at the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory Jena. This is the Observatory with its 1m telescope located in the small nearby town of Grossschwabhausen in the middle of a forest preserve. I spent more than 100 nights here, mostly observing transits of extrasolar planets for my fellow students and postdocs.
A system that will always be near and dear to my heart. HD185269 is an evolved nearby star, which is orbited by a planet detected with the radial velocity technique. In 2009, during my PhD in Jena, I observed this system with the lucky imaging instrument ASTRALUX at the Calar Alto observatory in southern Spain together with my then mentor Markus Mugrauer, and found that it has a faint, low-mass stellar companion (see the image with the white circle on the left). This was my first genuinely new discovery and I will never forget the excitement it brought. The original paper can be found here (click). In 2016, during one of the early SPHERE observation runs we returned to this system and found that the companion itself is a binary star, making this one of the rare stellar triple systems that host exoplanets (click).