I am a professor for Natural Area and Wildlife Management at the University of Applied Sciences Weihenstephan-Triesdorf and associate researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, with a habilitation (venia legendi in Urban Ecology) from the University of Münster.

I had the privilege of being trained in urban and wildlife ecology at leading institutions. I completed my PhD at the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology (ARCUE) at the University of Melbourne, and held postdoctoral positions at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) and Technische Universität Berlin (Berlin School of Urban Ecology) in Berlin. Before returning to Bavaria, I was also a guest professor of Urban Ecology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

My research centres on wildlife conservation and how people and wildlife can share space in cities and other human-dominated landscapes. Since my PhD, I have been passionate about understanding wildlife and people by combining ecological research with social science theories. After all, many threats to nature and wildlife are driven by human behaviour, while wildlife, like people, needs space and responds to human activities such as land-use change. Hence, I strongly believe that we need to understand the interplay within these complex social–ecological systems to understand evidence-based wildlife management and create conditions in which people and wildlife can coexist and even thrive, reflecting Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words that “all flourishing is mutual”.