Please give us a personal quote or a quote of a famous person (e.g. of Albert Einstein) that describes you and your life/work.
“Aufstehen ist die erste Niederlage jedes neuen Tages“ (unknown wise man, somewhere in the internet. To be honest I don’t really have a “philosophy of life”)

Please describe your job in only one sentence and tell us what the most important goal of this work is.
Sniffing the composition of noble gases in extraterrestrial gunk and debris and trying to make sense of it.

How did you get into this research/work field?
After graduation I didn’t find an acceptable job as a physicist (wasn’t ready yet…?) and instead found an exciting job ad for a PhD project on meteorites at ETH Zurich. Without doubt (but also without being planned) the best professional “decision” life decided for me.

What would be the greatest discovery you would like to see in your life time?
I would rant about “what the heck is phase Q, where does it come from, where do the noble gases come from, and why can we find it everywhere, in meteorites and comets and not in the planets” but I will better spare you the details.

You work for the NCCR PlanetS. What do you think will the NCCR enable you to do you couldn’t do without it?
With the help of Maïa Kuga, our recently hired and NCCR-funded postdoc, we hope to more systematically and thoroughly study the whereabouts of the volatile elements and their carrier phases: in the early solar system, in planets, comets, asteroids and during differentiation, and learn whether our results might be applicable to other worlds to be discovered.