Overview

I grew up with a strange name in a small village in Franconia.
I studied Sinology and Comparative Literature at Freie Universität Berlin and majored in General Linguistics at Technische Universität Berlin.
I spent a year in Beijing, where I studied at 北外 (Beijing Foreign Studies University) and worked at the Microsoft Research Center.
I was headed to SOAS for a PhD in Language Documentation when Manfred Krifka from Humboldt-Universität asked me whether I’d like to document languages in Vanuatu. I said yes.
While waiting for the grant decision on the documentation project, I worked with Malte Zimmermann at Potsdam University for 9 months on Chinese Information Structure.
Between 2009 and 2013, I documented two endangered and previously undescribed languages of Vanuatu: Daakaka and Dalkalaen.
After the documentation project, I wrote a grant proposal with Manfred Krifka. While waiting on the decision, I held positions at ZAS Berlin, working on embedding structures in Bislama, and at Humboldt-Universität, working on possession, serial verb constructions and modal semantics. In 2014, I had my son Leonhard and took 8 months of parental leave.
During the winter semester of 2017/18 I was a guest professor at Universität des Saarlandes, working on information density in cross-linguistic comparison.
Since March 2016, my project proposal with Manfred Krifka on TAM expressions in Melanesian languages has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Academic positions

2017-2018	Guest professor, SFB on Information Density and Linguistic Encoding, at Universität des Saarlandes
since 2016	Principal investigator, MelaTAMP project, funded by DFG
since 2014	Post-doctoral research fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
2013-2014	Post-doctoral research fellow, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Center for general linguistics), Berlin. PB3: Research on clause-embedding predicates in Bislama.
2009-2013	Research assistant in the DoBeS project documenting the languages of West Ambrym, Vanuatu: Documentation of Daakaka and Dalkalaen
2008-2009	Research assistant, Special Research Unit 632, Universität Potsdam: Investigations into information structure in Mandarin Chinese

Non-academic positions

2005-2006

Language expert, Microsoft Research Center Beijing (research on Text-to- Speech technology, phonology workshops for developers)

Education

2009-2012	Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Comparative Linguistics, Ph.D. thesis: A Grammar of Daakaka
2003-2008	Technische Universität Berlin, General Linguistics, M.A.; Freie Universität Berlin, Sinology (minor) and Comparative Linguistics (minor), M.A.
2005-2006	Beijing Foreign Studies University (北京外国语大学)