Rocks preserve information on enviornmental and biological processes at timescales not achieveable to human observation and experiments. But we cannot lay these two types of information, modern and geological, next to one another, and compare them at face value, because the the rock record preserves certain environments and moments in time, but eliminates others. My goal is to "translate" the Earth history to today's processes and vice versa, focussing on 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 microorganisms, conodonts, which are very 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 carried 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 level of material properties. This project was the basis of my habilitation (2021).

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.

Service to the community

1. Titular member of the Subcommission for Silurian Stratigraphy
2. Associate Editor at PALAIOS
3. Recommender for the Peer Community in Paleontology
4. Council member of the Palaeontological Association and the editor of its Newsletter (2020-2023)

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