I was born in Lahr, a beautiful small city in the Black Forest in Germany. With my parents and two younger brothers I lived in the south of Germany near Stuttgart and near Nürnberg. After graduating from Friedrich-Schiller-Gymnasium in Ludwigsburg, I moved to Freiburg to study at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität where I received my undergraduate degree in English, French and Business Administration in 1998. In 1998 I came to the US as an exchange student – and never went back. In 2000, I completed a Master’s Degree in Linguistics from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. In 2009, I received my Ph.D. in Modern Languages (French and Spanish) from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

I started teaching basic French courses as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Wayne State University in 2001. In Fall 2008, I began teaching all levels of French at the University of Dayton in Dayton, OH.