I studied biology at the Universität Konstanz, Germany. For my PhD thesis, I joined the laboratory of Henning Walczak, at that time a group-leader in Peter Krammers department at the DKFZ Heidelberg. My PhD thesis was on signal transduction in the TNF-receptor family. In 2006, I joined the laboratory of Jan Paul Medema at the AMC in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where I worked on cancer stem cells in glioblastoma and colon cancer.
I joined HI-STEM as a junior group leader in November 2009.