Profile

My wife and I moved to Ireland about six years ago for working here as scientists and teachers at Universities. I am originally from Bavaria, Germany, and grew up close to Munich. As a kid, I loved building and playing with remotely controlled airplanes. It gave me great satisfaction when the planes took off for the first time, but broke my heart when I crashed them.

English in School was not my favourite subject at all. Actually, I found it really difficult, while physics and maths were so much easier and more interesting! I bet my School teacher from back then would have never thought I’d be ending up in Ireland teaching students in English. Some interests and skills only develop later in life.

…that’s also true for one of my favourite hobbies: cooking. It started out with my mother who refused to bake my favorite cake every week, so I learnt how to do it myself. Other hobbies have remained the same over the years: hiking, reading books, meeting friends.

Our body is composed of many many cells of many different types. Alone your blood is home to at least 3 different cell types: red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. The platelets are the smallest cells but they are really important when it comes to stop bleeding when you have cut your finger. Platelets then heroically hold on to the cut and cling together to seal it off. How they do this is what we want to find out with our research. For example, we can measure how strong a single platelet pulls – if they were as large as a muscle cell, they would be much stronger than the strongest muscle cell! We also observe them under a microscope which allows us to see what is going on inside of the cell.

You might ask: Where is the maths or the physics? Well, all the methods we use to learn something about these small cells are borrowed from physics. And maths helps us to measure things in the microscopy images which helps us to find out if something is not right in the platelet. This hopefully will help is to find ways to help people who bleed because their platelets are not doing their job properly.

The LUAS takes me to work most days of the week. The other days I work from home at my laptop.

I am lucky because not every day at work is the same. As a lecturer, I teach medical students, pharmacy students or physiotherapy students. As a researcher, I discuss with younger researchers in my team about their experimental results and what next steps they could take. I also still do some experiments myself, especially when I want to try out something new that is not related to the ongoing projects of my team members. From time to time, I write a proposal to ask for money to start a new project. As a colleague, I help with the organisation of things that need to be done in my School.