I am a Genome Biology master student with a background in Animal Biology. My research interests are mainly in human mental states and mood disorders while discovering their relations with evolution. The focus of my master’s project is narrowed on the comparative analysis between the human genome and other mammals, especially non-human primates. The purpose of this project is to investigate the differences in genetic context of mood trait related loci.

I am an evolutionary biologist interested in the evolution of reproductive traits and genome evolution in general. After studying the evolution of reproductive morphology and behavior from an organismal perspective for a while, I am now using bioinformatics tools to study genome evolution in the Computational Systems Biology research group. Recently, I started studying the following question: 

• How can genomic variation be measured and what can these measures tell us about the evolutionary history of the study organisms? 

At the moment, I am trying to answer the question: 

• How can we modify standard genomics pipelines to study symbionts, parasites, and pathogens of a study organism in its natural habitat? 

For this, I explore genomic data from Great Tits (Parus major), that we sample from a nest box population in a forest close to the campus of the Bielefeld University. I conduct this research as a Bachelor Thesis project under the supervision of Prof Toni Gossmann and Dr. Quentin Foucault in collaboration with Nayden Chakarov (https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/biologie/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/behaviour/team/hosts-parasites/).