Born and educated in Vienna I have studied Molecular Microbiology at the Vienna University. For my diploma thesis I chose to work on biological topics in a more formal way. Currently I am engaged in graduate studies on the field of multiple sequence alignments at the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry and Structural Biology in Vienna.

I received my Masters Degree with the MSc thesis 'Improved Alignments Based on a Combination of Amino Acid and Nucleic Acid Sequence Information'. In this research I developed and implemented an alignment method for nucleic acid sequences that combines amino acid based alignments of the coding regions with nucleic acid based alignments of non-coding regions. My PhD thesis is also engaged with combined amino acid and nucleic acid based multiple alignments, but with a different and completely new approach that overcomes inaccuracies of former implementations. We were able to improve multiple alignments of viral RNA sequences significantly, which is of particular importance for our methods of detecting conserved secondary structure elements in RNA viruses. Some of my further research interests are sequence evolution and the relationships between genetic sequence, structure and function.