I am a trained microbiologist investigating diverse microbiomes on Earth (confined built environments of hospitals and cleanrooms, humans, plants, etc.) and beyond (space station, space analog habitats, etc.), mainly with bioinformatics methods. My main interest is the complex interaction of microbes with their surrounding habitat and how to translate such knowledge into future diagnostic applications.

I studied molecular microbiology (Bachelor 2009, Master's 2012, PhD 2016) at the Karl Franzens and the Technical University in Graz. My education and Postdoc career were accompanied by diverse research stays at the Archaea Center at the University in Regensburg (Germany), the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech in Pasadena, CA, USA, the UCSD and Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, USA, and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, WA, USA. Specifically, my acquired experiences from versatile labs around the world consolidated my interdisciplinary research profile, which led to numerous publications and which were honored with five awards.