TL;DR: My current project: ERC StartingGrant MindTheGap | Latest software: CarboKitten.jl | Latest paper: first Open Source stratigraphic forward model for carbonates | Latest preprint: Phylogenetic inference from an incomplete fossil record | In September I am co-organizing a Lorentz Workshop on bridging stratigraphy and phylogenetics | Personal update: from September 2026 Professor in Palaeontology at Münster University
Rocks under our feet are an archive of information on evolutionary and environment changes that span timescales we cannot observe today. If we could tap into the rich history of the Earth preserved in rocks and fossils, we could put today's environmental challenges, biodiversity and even ourselves in a context and understand where it comes form. I "translate" the Earth history to today's processes and vice versa, focusing on the interaction between the physical rock record and evolutionary processes.
I am a paleobiologist with a PhD (2015, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the emerging field of stratigraphic palaeobiology. I demonstrated that several extinction events were artefacts best explained by the physical structure of the geological record. To be able to address this quantitatively, I befriended the extinct group of toothed microorganisms, conodonts, which are fun to study thanks to their high evolutionary rates.
Conodonts are the first vertebrates to have evolved a skeleton. I became interested in how this key evolutionary innovation came about and, together with my (then) PhD student Bryan Shirley, we used methods from materials science and mineralogy to carry out the first in situ crystallographic analysis of conodont skeletons. It allowed us to test the hypothesis that they evolved in adaptation to dental function at the ultrastructural level. This project was the basis of my habilitation (2021).
My own origins are in cell and molecular physiology (BSc and MSc in Biology at the University of Warsaw): I studied how cell transport and gene expression respond to oxidative stress and, as I grow older, this knowledge still has everyday applications! In parallel, I graduated in Stratigraphy and Basin analysis, which took me from the lab into fieldwork in Ukraine, where I spent many months mapping and collecting fossils.
In 2021, I joined the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University, where I am leading the ERC Starting Grant MindTheGap: Quantifying the completeness of the stratigraphic record and its role in reconstructing the tempo and mode of evolution. You can read more about my current research here.
