I am broadly interested in natural genetic variation. After completing my diploma thesis, which involved combing the vineyards of Southern Germany for feral vines and grape phylloxera, I joined the Jiménez-Gómez lab at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne in 2011. I was awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Cologne, having written my thesis on the impact of domestication on the circadian clock and flowering time in tomato. After a postdoc at the Copenhagen Plant Science Centre in Denmark on the rules and roles of divergent non-coding transcription, I finally joined the Thünen Institute in the summer of 2017. Currently, I am working on unlocking some of the amazing natural potential of different forest tree species for breeding and conservation.

Annika joined the lab in 2018. As a technician in the 'poplar dioecy' project she manages our tissue culture, extracts high-molecular-weight DNA for long-read sequencing and organizes hundreds of seedlings in the greenhouse. We are super happy to have her!

Conny joined the lab in 2022. With previous experience in QTL mapping in honey bee, sexual selection in Chinook salmon and molecular analyses of hypoxia tolerance of diving mammals, she is now focusing on high-throughput phenotyping of beech trees. By combining this phenotypic information with genomic data, Conny will contribute to our understanding of the genetic basis of different traits in a keystone forest tree species.

Desanka joined our group in September 2023. While working on genomic signatures of ecological speciation, adaptation and parallel evolution of oaks during her PhD, she enjoyed answering biological questions using genomics and particularly analysing big data sets. In our group she does all kinds of cool genomics analyses (Lazic et al. 2024) and is currently working on generating a beech pangenome.