Since August 2009 I work as a PostDoc in the Cosmology Group of the University of California at Davis.  However, I am not a cosmologist. I work in stellar astrophysics and astronomical instrumentation. Before I moved to the US, I worked as a PostDoc in Ansgar Reiners Emmy Noether research group on Magnetic Activity from Stars to Planets in Goettingen, Germany. From 2004 - 2006 I worked as a PhD student at the European Southern Observatoy (ESO) in Garching, Germany.

My scientific interests are rather broad but mostly focused on brown dwarfs, low mass stars,  and exoplanets. I work with imaging techniques and high resolution spectroscopy. Recently, I developed and built gas absorption cells for infrared spectrographs such as CRIRES at the VLT and IRCS at SUBARU. These cells will allow the detection of extrasolar planets around M type stars and even L type brown dwarfs. A press release on this work can be found here.

A recent list of my publications can be found here.

Moreover I am very interested in instrumentation projects. I was involved in the characterisation and commissioning of CRIRES, a high-resolution near-infrared spectrograph that started regular operation in 2007 at UT1 on Paranal. At UC Davis, I work for Matt Richter, who is the PI of EXES, a high-resolution mid-infrared spectrograph for SOFIA, an infrared telescope flying in a Boeing 747.

One of my weird hobbies is dedicated to the history of astronomy. One result was an exhibition in August 2004 at the Library of the University of Jena, presenting celestial atlases spanning four centuries. A booklet of the exhibition in pdf format can be found here (sorry, only in German yet).