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I was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 11, 1970. In 1990, I started to study physics at the University of Hamburg. For my diploma thesis, I joined a research group that carried out experiments at the COoler SYnchrotron COSY at the Research Center Jülich. This was the starting point of my journey into the fascinating world of particle physics, the beginning of my work at particle accelerators and of my “travels for physics” – the small town Jülich is situated around 500 km from Hamburg.
After my diploma degree, which I got in 1996, I decided to stay in experimental physics, but to move on to higher energies – which refers of course to the energy of the particle beam. For my PhD thesis, I then concentrated on the elastic scattering of protons.
Right after I got my PhD at the University of Hamburg, I was offered a job as a young scientist at DESY – the German accelerator laboratory in Hamburg, a sister laboratory of Fermilab or SLAC in the USA – in April 2000. At DESY, particle accelerators are being developed, constructed and then operated for both experimental particle physics and research with photons. Meanwhile, a total of 2900 scientists from 33 countries are working here in the two fields.
 I am a member of a working group that concentrates on the future: We are working on a detector for the planned International Linear Collider (ILC), an approximately 35-kilometer-long accelerator facility in which electrons and positrons will collide at high energies. The goal is to answer questions about such exciting topics as the big bang, the origin of matter, dark matter or dark energy – questions that particle physicists all over the world want to study together using the ILC in about 10 years. They agreed upon the ILC in August last year in Peking. Until then, DESY had been working in Hamburg with many international partners on the TESLA project, the superconducting accelerator technology of which has been chosen for the ILC. Of course, DESY now participates in the global ILC. To that effect, DESY created the project ILC@DESY in October 2004, of which I became the Scientific Assistant.
Of course, I also have a private life. I got married in August 2001 and now have a nine-months-old son. I enjoy reading during my free time, or occupying myself with flight simulations. But my family and my work leave me almost no spare time for my hobbies.
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