01 December 2022
National Geographic's 22 most amazing discoveries of 2022!

Amazing! Literally! Our discovery of a REM sleep-like state made it into the  National Geographic's list  of the 22 most amazing discoveries of this year- we are super psyched about it!

Read more about it and the 21 other amazing discoveries here​

08 August 2022
Jumping spiders experience REM sleep-like state! 
Our discovery of an REM sleep-like state in jumping spiders was published in PNAS and got quite a lot of public and media attantion including from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Science, National Public Radio (NPR). (I'll update this list in the next weeks!)

Listen to a radio interview here:​

21 October 2021
Arachno-Arachnophobia! Jumping spiders recognize stationary predators! 

Our paper on static visual predator recognition was published in Functional Ecology and got some Halloween-themed media attantion from National Public Radio (NPR). Listen to the interview on their science podcast Short Wave here: ​

19 May 2021
Hanging spiders

Our paper on an unusual (but apparently widespread) resting strategy in a common jumping spider got published in Frontiers in Zoology and it got some media attention from Popular Science, National Public Radio (NPR) and Ethologisch.
These spiders rest at night by suspending themselves from the vegetation on a single silk thread. This strategy potentially works as an early alarm system via silk-borne vibration sensing or/and simply by bringing the spiders out of reach for nocturnal predators. It is wild how little we really know about the night-time lives of even common creatures!

23 Feb 2021
Independent 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in Konstanz!

Great news! I have been chosen for an independent 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the ​​Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz ! Starting in June, I will be joining Alex Jordan's lab at the Max-Planck Institute of Animal Behavior to study more cool jumping spider behavior and adaptations!

14 Jan 2021
Cell implements inclusion and diversity statement!

After publishing a correspondence in Nature suggesting that journals should implement equity, diversity and inlcusion statements in the publishing process to fight unconscious bias and inequality, we reached out to numerous Editors in Chief as well as publishers of major journals suggesting our idea directly. The postitive feeback from journals was great and several journals have taken our suggestion seriously and refined it. With Cell, a major publisher has now started the implementation of an inclusion and diversity statement in the majority of its primary reserach journals. We are thrilled to see it and congratulate them on how thouroughly they have realized this. The story was also covered in Science. Time for more journals to follow their lead!

23 Nov 2020
​Blogpost on eDNA-clay method out in Methods.blog

In a piece on the official methods blog of Methods in Ecology and Evolution, I explain how we came up with the eDNA-clay method and how we realized it. Read the whole blogpost here!