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 graduated with a BSc (2007) and MSc (2010) in Biology and a Diploma (2012) in Geology from the College of Inter-faculty Individual Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Warsaw. I was granted a research project by the German Science Foundation, which funded my PhD (2015) in the emerging field of stratigraphic palaeobiology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. 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.

Publications and Open Science

1. Google Scholar
2. Open Science Framework

Public engagement

1. Development of a new course in Science Communication (at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), in which students created video clips about their research.
2. Invited speaker for the Soapbox Science event in Munich
3. Contributions to Geology of the Tour de France, an initiative to explain the geological underpinning of the famous race

Service to the community

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

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