I'm a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist from Germany, born in Australia. Since November 2022, I have been LOEWE Start Professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Quantitative Psychiatry at Justus Liebig University Giessen. I also lead the Vision and Computational Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, which I joined in November 2019.

I studied psychology, with a focus on neuro-cognitive psychology, at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, the University of Melbourne, and LMU Munich. Following my master's degree, I completed my PhD at Humboldt University Berlin, working at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain under the supervision of John-Dylan Haynes and Tobias Donner.

After my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Jan Gläscher at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. From 2016 to 2019, I was a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Chris Baker's group at the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Teaching and open science are important parts of my work. I teach cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, statistics, and methods, and have taught hands-on workshops and short courses in many places around the world, including Leipzig, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Munich, Bern, Bethesda, Washington DC, Boston, and Sydney. These courses have covered brain-imaging analysis, advanced statistics, multivariate pattern analysis, machine learning, and comparisons between brains, behavior, and deep neural networks.

I am a founder of the THINGS initiative and author of The Decoding Toolbox, and I spearheaded the LAION-fMRI dataset and the re:vision replication initiative. This open-science engagement was recognized with the 2022 IGOR Prize for Open and Reproducible Research.

I also enjoy communicating science beyond academia through interviews, podcasts, and public events. My work has been featured in outlets including FAZ, Nautilus Magazine, human Magazine, BrainInspired, Deutschlandfunk, WDR/Quarks, and MDR Wissen. In 2025, this engagement was recognized with the CMBB Science Communication Prize.