People

I am currently leading a research group supported by the Lower Saxony Center for Artificial Intelligence and Causal Methods in Medicine (CAIMed) which is funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony through funds from the program zukunft.niedersachsen of the Volkswagen Foundation. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher with financial support by a fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before coming to MIT, I was a PhD student in the Department of Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, supported by a fellowship from the Graduate School of Quantitative Biosciences Munich (formerly QBM, now QMB).

I am interested in the self-organized dynamics of living systems and their noisy response to external mechanochemical stimuli. To study the dynamics of systems such as chromatin, biomolecular condensates, cells and tissues, as well as the immune response, I develop and apply the methods of theoretical biophysics, statistical mechanics, and dynamical systems theory. I study both deterministic and stochastic systems with a combination of analytical “pen & paper” calculations and numerical simulations using kinetic Monte Carlo algorithms, Brownian dynamics simulations, and Finite Element methods. My current research elucidates the conformational dynamics of active polymers, the co-phase separation dynamics of proteins in the presence of energy-consuming processes, and the innate immune response.