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.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas A. Edison

Please describe your job in only one sentence and tell us what the most important goal of this work is.
I work on developing an unified model for dust evolution and planetesimal formation that will produce realistic initial conditions for models of later stages of planet accretion. The long term goal is to explain where do the observed properties of the Solar System and those of extrasolar planetary systems come from.

How did you get into this research/work field?
When I was starting my Bachelor project in 2009, a PhD student in the same research group got interested in a new computational method for dust growth that had been developed by Andras Zsom and Kees Dullemond in Heidelberg. My Master project was inspired by this work and I got a PhD position in Heidelberg later.

What would be the greatest discovery you would like to see in your life time?
Finding life on an exoplanet is certainly something everyone is looking forward to. On a less spectacular scale, I would like to have the chondrule forming process explained.

You work for the NCCR PlanetS. What do you think will the NCCR enable you to do you couldn’t do without it?
The NCCR PlanetS is the first large venture that I am directly a part of and I hope that it broadens my academic experience on many different levels. I am very happy to be involved in this project and to be surrounded by so many people working on related topics.