Hazards beach, Tasmania
I have studied physics and astronomy at the University of Bonn and received my Diploma in May 2001, working on "VLBI observations of Seyfert 2 Galaxies" at the MPIfR, and this is basically how I got in touch with radio astronomy.
From 2001-2004 I worked on my PhD thesis at the MPIfR, and I got involved in various projects: developing the method of fast frequency switching to calibrate VLBI observations, polarization observations of nearby AGN, VLBI monitoring of the nearby Seyfert NGC3079, single-dish monitoring of a loosely defined sample of Seyferts with the Effelsberg telescope and some public outreach.
I received my PhD in April 2004, entitled "Gas and Absorbers in Nearby AGN and a New Phase Calibration Method for VLBI", and commenced a postdoc position at the ATNF in Sydney in June 2004.
At the ATNF my interests shifted a bit studying the galaxy formation history of the Universe using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). This collaboration has now become the ATLAS survey and is what I've spend most of my time on. I did a fair share of hardware-related work and learned more about radio interferometry than most astronomers want to know.
I also was project scientist for the 7 mm upgrade of the ATCA, got involved in a little bit of teaching (summer vacation students, high school internships and the like) and designed and built web cams for live monitoring of the Parkes and ATCA telescopes
I moved back to Germany in January 2007 to work as a staff astronomer at the University of Bochum. My main work now revolves around wide-field VLBI observations of various "deep fields", to determine the fraction of radio AGN. While I continue working on the ATLAS project I now also have teaching obligations, and teach courses in experimental physics, astronomical instrumentation, and radio interferometry. In 2012 I submitted my Habilitation (something like a second, higher-level PhD in the German education system, see Wikipedia), and now am Privatdozent.
In February 2017 I left astronomy to pursue a career in data analysis in industry.
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