Profile

I love discovering new places and meeting people from all over the world. I have lived in Cambridge UK, Cambridge US, Waterloo Canada, Amsterdam and London. I am fluent in German and spend some of my time each year in Germany with my partner who is a researcher in Mathematics.

As a theoretical physicist, I strive to understand the fundamental laws that govern our universe. Physical theories are rarely complete: they usually work well at certain scales and for certain parameter ranges.

For example classical mechanics makes predictions about how mundane objects move under the action of forces, but cannot be used to predict the dynamics of electrons inside atoms. For that we need quantum mechanics. Similarly, quantum mechanics is not relevant in explaining most phases in the lifetime of our universe to date, planets, stars or black holes. For that we need thermodynamics and general relativity.

But what if we wanted to understand the very early stages of our universe, right after the Big Bang, or the very late stages in the lifetime of a black hole? In these regimes gravitational and quantum interactions are both expected to be important. Nevertheless, we currently lack a fully consistent theory that can describe both effects at the same time. We also don’t have any experiments allowing us to probe these regimes. In other words, we have no idea what “quantum gravity” really is.

Over the years, much progress has been made in understanding bits and pieces of this theory. Some think it’s fundamental building blocks are strings, others think they are spacetime loops and we also have some evidence now that maybe at a fundamental level, gravity is just quantum mechanics in disguise. Whatever this theory is, we know that it should reduce to general relativity and quantum mechanics in appropriate limits. In my research, I try to understand to what extent these limits constrain the space of possible theories of quantum gravity.

I sometimes work from home. Being a theoretical physicist means that my work schedule and location are very flexible. I don’t need any equipment to do my work, just motivation, perseverance and a lot of focus. Sometimes I may not be in the right mindset to do research, in which case I prefer focusing on other activities such as preparing for lectures, talks or catching up with recent papers.