Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

German Youth Steering Committee

I grew up near Celle, Germany, and first got infected with a passion for the north on a trip to Churchill, Manitoba, while being an exchange student in Winnipeg. I then studied geoecology in Braunschweig focusing primarily on groundwater hydrology until I moved to Anchorage, Alaska on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2002. Here, I worked on methane and carbon dioxide fluxes from degrading permafrost areas near Fairbanks and received a Master of Science in Environmental Science in 2003. Continuing on my transect through Alaska I moved up to Barrow, AK and spent a year working at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium doing a bit of everything from science to science support in the field, outreach, coordination, and a lot of networking before starting my PhD at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany.

For my PhD I conducted closed chamber flux measurements as well as the first known continuous whole-season micrometeorological eddy covariance flux measurements of methane in the Siberian Arctic at the Russian-German Research Station Samoylov Island and studied the processes involved in methane exchange between ecosystems and the atmosphere on two spatial scales.

In April 2009 I moved to the German Research Centre for Geosciences to lead the Methan Airborne Mapper (MAMap) project and study methane on a third scale using a high-resolution two-channel grating spectrometer that can be mounted on aircraft and helicopters.