About

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I grew up in a small village directly adjacent to the city of Hamburg, Germany. I hold a bachelor's degree in Social Sciences from the Justus-Liebig University Gießen and a master's degree in Political Science with a focus on on quantitative methods and comparative politics from the University of Mannheim. In the summer of 2020, I completed my doctoral studies at the Center for Doctoral Studies in Social and Behavioral Sciences (CDSS). Since then, I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 884.

My research focuses on advanced quantitative methods, particularly spatial econometrics, Bayesian statistics, and latent variable modeling. Using observational data and stochastic simulations, I study the consequences of different methodological problems associated with the application of spatial regression models for substantive inferences regarding social science theories and develop different methodological improvements. Besides my methodological work, I am also doing research on party competition, party politics, and legislative decision-making. Amongst others, I investigate diffusion and learning processes among parties within and across the different European multiparty systems and how these processes lead to endogenously evolving dynamics of party competition.

Throughout my employment at the SFB 884, I design and implement different survey experiments in the German Internet Panel (GIP) in order to study public perceptions of democratic decision-making and how different questioning techniques can improve prevalence estimates of sensitive traits at the aggregate level. I am also a member of the Mannheim Corona Study research team. By investigating the consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the impacts of the far-reaching policy measures designed to contain the spread of the virus on the German population, our results informed several federal governmental agencies, including the joint crisis management team of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (Bundesministerium des Inneren, BMI), the Federal Ministry of Health (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit, BMG), and the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales, BMAS) as well as the Federal Institute for Population Research (Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung, BiB).