I hold a doctorate in law, awarded summa cum laude, and passed the German state law examination (the equivalent of a JD) in 2006, having completed my LL.B. at Bucerius Law School in 2003. Early on, I also studied law and cultural studies at the University of Cape Town and clerked at the then newly established Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg in 2003, formative experiences that shaped my interest in law across cultural and political contexts.

My academic path began at the University of Hamburg, where I worked as a researcher at the chair of Prof. Reinhard Merkel (Criminal Law and Legal Philosophy) from 2006 to 2012. From 2015 to 2017, I served there as interim Juniorprofessor of Criminal Law and Criminology. I was a Young Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld from 2016 to 2021 and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford in 2019. I am also affiliated with the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Sciences (IDPCC) at the University of Lisbon.

Since 2012, I have been principal investigator of seven research projects, most of them international and interdisciplinary in scope.

My work has been recognized with several awards. In 2013, I received the Young Scholar Award of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and my dissertation was honored as the faculty’s best thesis of 2015. In 2019, the German Academy of Ethics in Medicine (AEM) awarded me its annual prize for young researchers for a paper on the tension between trauma therapy and the criminal justice system. Together with my colleague Julia Geneuss, I received the 2022 teaching prize of the Hamburg Senate for our virtual lecture series on the law of sexual offenses.

I regularly advise national and international institutions  including the German Ministry of Justice and the Federal Foreign Office, as well as the United Nations, Interpol, and the OSCE.

Beyond academia, I am the managing director of Experimental Spaces, a non-profit I founded with friends to protect inner-city properties from gentrification and transform them into spaces for cultural and community life.