About Me

 
 
 

I was born in a small town near Frankfurt in Germany and spent the first 14 years of my life there. In 1996 I moved with my family to Japan, which truly was a life-changing experience. I loved the challenge of starting a new life in Tokyo and very much enjoyed learning about the richness of Japanese culture and arts. To this day, I am a huge fan of Japanese art and crafts.


In 1998, I moved on my own to England with the plan to spend a semester at Bishop’s Stortford College and with the goal of improving my English. However, I was very quickly convinced to stay on and to finish my A-levels there. It was a whole different story to convince my parents that this was a good idea - but with the help of my physics teacher - I succeeded. Doing A-levels was great fun, since I could focus on the things I truly loved: Maths, Physics & Art.


I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge in fall 2000 where I spent four happy years studying physics. It really was a special experience reading Physics at a place that has such a rich history in this field. As my time in Cambridge was coming to an end I knew two things with certainty: 1) I wanted to do a PhD in astrophysics and 2) I wanted to experience living in a new country.


So I decided to go to graduate school at Caltech, where the constant blue skies of Southern California were a welcome contrast to the many gray and rainy days that I had experienced in England. At Caltech I had the great fortune to work with my PhD advisor Re’em Sari on topics ranging from the formation of the terrestrial planets to the search of small Kuiper Belt objects using stellar occultations.


After my PhD I spent one year at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto before moving to UCLA as a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, where I spent 3 fruitful and stimulating years. In 2013 I became an assistant professor at MIT where I had an appointment in the department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and in Physics. I moved to UCLA in 2016 where I am an associate professor in Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences and in Physics and Astronomy. In addition, I still hold a visiting faculty appointment at MIT.


When I am not working, I spend my time either painting, scuba diving, traveling the world, or walking my feisty Alaskan Malamute, Makalu.

 

About Me


 

Playing with my dog - I got this picture into Nature (see here)

One of my many paintings

Top: With my husband traveling in Cambodia. Bottom: Diving in the Red Sea