I’m a postdoctoral researcher at Leipzig University. My work is called Phenoplexity focusing on the question: What is the rhythm of ecosystems and what happens when climate change disrupts it?

I develop novel mathematical and AI-based approaches to analyse phenology across scales from ground to satellite observations. I employ diverse modelling frameworks, from differential equations to machine learning, to uncover synchronisation, emergent behaviour in ecological systems, and predict the impact of climate change on phenology.

Currently, I am leading the ESA project DeepFeatures which seeks to extract spatio-temporal features from satellite data. I am also funded by the proposed excellence cluster Breathing Nature where I contribute to the interdisciplinary work (biology, economics, meteorology, physics) studying the interactions between biodiversity, climate and human behaviour.

Past projects include: “Extracting spatiotemporal macroecological patterns using crowd-sourced plant occurrence data” funded by FLEXPOOL, iDiv. Data: Flora Incognita

Supervision (recent)

• Kathleen Wende, Reflectance of herbaceous plant phenology
• Julia Peters, PhD funded by DeepFeatures, Spatio-temporal features extraction
• Francesco Martinuzzi, PhD funded by ScaDS.AI, Modeling impacts of extreme events using Reservoir Computing
• Leonard Schulz, Master thesis with Theoretical Physics, Inferring dynamical information of the Earth system from dimensionality-reduction, 2023
• Anna Schackow, Bachelor in Meteorology, Multiscale time series decomposition of sapflux measurements, 2023

Awards and grants include

• Principal investigator for the DeepFeatures project funded by ESA AI4Science, 2024-2026
• Work package principal investigator for the DeepExtremes project funded by ESA AI4Science, 2022-2024
• Forschungspreis 2015, Paderborn University, Germany
• Technion Postdoctoral Scholarship (2014-15), Israel
• Funding for organising an EWM summer school mini-course (2013): Dynamical systems and bifurcation theory with applications to the dynamics of planet Earth
• Doctoral Training Scholarship EPSRC-SCI-DTA (2008-13), UK

Public outreach

• MDR Wissen
• Radio Mephisto 97.6
• Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition - Living in a Complex World
• 50 Visions of Mathematics

For more details please visit my personal site.