I am interested in how the human reading system processes printed words, with a particular focus on units that carry meaning ("morphemes"). Besides my focus on rapid, automatic reading mechanisms in adults, I am also interested in how children learn to read and when during reading development word processing becomes more intuitive and automatized.

Education

I completed a Bachelor of Science with a major in Computational Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2003.

I then commenced a Master of Science degree at the University of Stuttgart in 2003, while shifting my research focus to Psycholinguistics. My Masters project was hosted by Prof Friedemann Pulvermueller at the University of Cambridge, UK, where I spent most of 2005. I used the recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate rapid, spoken language processing in the brain, and completed my degree in 2006.

In 2007, I moved to Australia to undertake a PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University under the supervision of Prof Anne Castles and Prof Max Coltheart. My PhD project focussed on understanding how children and adults rapidly read words that contain multiple morphemes (e.g. un-pack-ing) using experimental methods such as lexical decision and masked priming.

Employment

Following my PhD, I was awarded four consecutive internationally competitive research fellowships which allowed me to carry out several years of in-depth research in the field of reading and reading acquisition, and expand my collaborative network.

I spent 3.5 years (2013-2016) as a postdoctoral research fellow within the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (LPC) at Aix-Marseille University, France, which was funded by the award of an internationally competitive full-time Fyssen Foundation research fellowship (2 years), followed by a prestigeous Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Brain & Language Research Institute (1.5 years).

In October 2016, I moved back to Australia to take up a 3-year full-time Macquarie University Research Fellowship (MQRF).

I am currently employed as an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow at the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University.