About me
I am a DFG Heisenberg
fellow and permanent staff member at the Landessternwarte Königstuhl (LSW)
which is part of the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University.
I obtained my Master and PhD at the University of Tübingen, where I worked in the stellar
atmosphere group with Klaus Werner and Thomas Rauch. During this time my research focused on the spectral analysis of hot (pre-) white dwarfs, i.e.
the extremely hot, helium-dominated O(He) stars, the central star of the Stingray Nebula, and hot, H-deficient white dwarfs. Furthermore, I developed
services and tools in the framework of the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory.
In 2016 I moved to Leicester to work with Martin Barstow and others on a project that aims to detect a gravitational field effect on the fine structure constant α.
In 2017 I was awarded a research fellowship of the Royal Commission for the
Exhibition of 1851, which allowed me to continue my research on hot (pre-) white dwarfs from large sky surveys, close binary
systems, and to investigate a particularly baffling class of white dwarfs, which show ultra-high excitation absorption lines in their
optical spectra. In April 2019 was offered a generous open topic postdoc position offered by the University of Potsdam and enjoyed working with the
stellar astrophysics group around Stephan Geier.