I completed medical school at the University of Goettingen, Germany and performed laboratory research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the Charité University hospital in Berlin, for which I received a doctorate from the University of Berlin. I then moved to Munich to undergo clinical training in Hematology/Oncology at the University of Munich, where I was co-investigator for several clinical trials studying treatments for patients with leukemia. Since 2017 I have been a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ravi Majeti at Stanford where we study how healthy blood stem cells evolve into leukemia. The career development award I received from the LLS will allow me to better study how ASXL1, which is frequently mutated in blood cancers, leads to transformation of healthy blood cells into leukemia and how we can develop effective therapies. The support by the LLS is crucial to this work and I am deeply honored to have received their support.