Making complexity feel navigable
I’ve always been drawn to systems that are too complex to immediately make sense of. Not because I enjoy complexity for its own sake, but because that’s usually where things matter most…where decisions get made, where signals get lost, and where small design choices may end up shaping very large outcomes.
My path into this is far from linear. My background is in life sciences research, where I learned to work with data, uncertainty, and systems that don’t behave in linear ways. Over time, my focus shifted away from producing knowledge to working in the space where knowledge becomes decision-making: policy, implementation, and public administration.
Most of my work sits in the space between ideas and implementation, where well-designed systems either hold together or quietly break down. I focus on making that space more legible, so decisions can be made with more confidence and less friction.
Right now, I work as a Scientific Officer supporting the German Federal Government’s Action Programme on Natural Climate Protection. A lot of my work sits in what you might call the “quiet infrastructure” of policy: monitoring and evaluation, indicator systems, data structures, and the question of whether we are actually measuring what we think we are measuring. In practice, that often eels less like reporting on programmes and more like building the scaffolding that lets a system see itself clearly enough to improve.
How I Tend To Work
A lot of my work is about translation: between disciplines, institutions, and sometimes just different ways of talking about the same problem.
- Between Policy & Practice:
A lot of ideas are sound until they meet reality. I’ve spent a lot of my work in that gap between strategy and execution, trying to make sure that what is designed can actually survive contact with implementation without losing its meaning. - Making technical work usable beyond specialists
I’m interested in how technical knowledge becomes usable without losing its meaning. One example is my work on the German Invasiveness Screening Kit, a risk assessment tool for invasive species. A big part of that project wasn’t technical innovation, but simplification in the honest sense: reducing friction and language barriers so that people outside a narrow expert community can actually use it without misinterpretation. - Education as something that should stay connected to reality
In my work with programme accreditation in the life sciences, I’m also lookin for alignment: whether curricula actually prepare people for the kinds of problems they will face outside of academia. - Career transitions and structural reality
I also spend time working with early-career researchers navigating the shift beyond academia. Through talks and workshops I focus less on “career advice” and more on how systems shape available paths in the first place
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