My mission

When COVID hit in 2020, the world came to a standstill. We had no vaccine against this disease, and the normal process for developing vaccines can take a decade. Yet within a year, a vaccine was approved, manufactured, and rolled out. This was only possible with unprecedented collaboration between research, industry, and government.

SPRIND, Germany’s federal agency for breakthrough innovation, exists to apply that same sense of urgency to other moonshot technologies. Modeled after DARPA, we identify and fund radical innovations that can’t be realized by private companies or traditional research funding alone. We back bold ideas with substantial funding, like multi-year challenges for broad-spectrum antivirals that could protect us from future pandemics, or quantum computing applications for drug discovery.

My role is to identify promising breakthrough innovations at the intersection of health, biotechnology, and AI – and help turn them from ambitious research into products and systems that fundamentally improve people’s lives.

My path

For as long as I can remember, my curiosity has centered around medical, material and scientific progress. I studied medicine after high school (in Germany, you go straight to medical school, no pre-med program required). While at university, though, I was also an avid member of the debate club, won the national debate championship twice, and was part of the first German team to reach the open knock-out stages of the World Universities Debating Championships.

My medical studies focused on neuroscience, especially on novel methods in digital health and brain stimulation for neurodegenerative diseases. As I was finishing medical school, I became increasingly interested in the systems and policies that determine which (biomedical) innovations actually make it from lab to real world. I worked in the German parliament working on health policy, and became a Fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute, where I wrote about European innovation policy and why we need bolder approaches to technological progress.

At SPRIND I‘m helping repair Germany’s innovation engine by combining my medical background with my passion for breakthrough technology across science, startups and policy.