I’m a German zooplankton ecologist and started my studies in this field in 1995 at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. Excited about the complex behaviour of little planktonic creatures called copepods, I continued to study their ecology and conducted a comparative study in the Mediterranean and the North Sea, resulting in a bi-national PhD degree, conferred in 2001 by the Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris VI (France) and the University of Oldenburg (Germany). I have studied the ecology of copepods ever since in a number of postdoctoral projects based at the University of Hamburg (Germany), the University of Washington, Seattle (USA), and the University Centre on Svalbard (Norway). I have lived and worked on Spitsbergen in the high Arctic for two years studying population ecology of arctic plankton. I joined APECS as biology discipline coordinator in early 2007. I am now based at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, from where I will continue my research in the Arctic.