As professor of Lunar and Planetary Exploration at TUM, my goal is to develop and expand our knowledge and capabilities in space science and exploration. Besides research, my priority is the education of our students, providing them with the best possible opportunities and supervision to acquire and develop their skills and prepare for a future career. 

The overarching motivation of my research emerges from three main aspects:

a) developing a better understanding of volatiles and space resources on planetary bodies (e.g. investigating the lunar water cycle),

b) building the instrumentation to enable their in-situ characterisation (e.g. to measure the subsurface soil properties on planetary bodies), and

c) provide means to extract and utilise resources (e.g. producing oxygen/water/metals from planetary soil).  

My contributions to several committees and working groups include ESA’s PROSPECT science team (since 2019), ESA’s ISRU Topical Team (since 2018), ESA's SciSpacE Expert Strategy Group (since 2022), ESA’s Moon Exploration Strategy Team (2020-2022), the International Lunar Research Team Working Group (2020-2022), and the Center for Lunar and Asteroid Surface Science of NASA SSERVI. Since 2022, I am among the principal investigators of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster at TUM. I am member of the Science Organising Committee for the annual European Lunar Symposium, and was part of the organising committee for two ESA workshops on ISRU, precursors of the now well-established annual Space Resources Week. I have served as guest editor for Frontiers in Space Technologies and Planetary and Space Sciences and as a reviewer for various other scientific journals, among them Nature Astronomy, Nature Scientific Reports, Icarus, Acta Geotechnica, and others.

For a first impression of my research, have a look at this article.