About Me
I grew up in Baden-Württemberg, southern Germany, where fossil and rock collecting is a hobby of almost everyone. The Schwäbische Alb is a mountain range formed by tectonic uplift and erosion of Triassic and Jurassic shallow-marine deposits. Ammonites, belemnites and many other fossils are testimony of a once flourishing tropical biocoenosis. I carried fossils home from long weekend hikes or from visits of outcrops provided to the public by the famous museum of Holzmaden. Fascinated by the strange worlds of Earth’s past, it was never a question to me that I would become a geologist. I studied at the Geologisch-Paläontologisches Institut of the University of Tübingen. During a geological field trip to the Buntsandstein of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), I detected my love for clastic sedimentology. As the last graduate student of Dolf Seilacher, before he retired from Tübingen, I worked on reconstructing the paleoenvironment of the Lower Arenigian of the Montagne Noire, France, with a focus on the trace fossil Daedalus halli. After that I moved to the University of Oldenburg in northern Germany in order to join Gisela Gerdes’ and Wolfgang Krumbein’s working group. The Institut für Chemie und Biologie des Meeres was a quite different research environment than that I was used to from Tübingen. The research on modern sand flats of the North Sea gave rise to the before only little studied influence of benthic microbiota on the morphology of “purely physical” sedimentary structures. During my PhD thesis I developed the concept of ‘microbially induced sedimentary structures (MISS), a group of structures now forming their own research field in clastic sedimentology. Such structures are in the meantime known from many aquatic settings even in rocks as old as early Archean (3.48 Ga, Pilbara, West Australia). After brief postdoctoral research visits at the University of Frankfurt/M. and at Harvard University (as guest of Andrew Knoll), I joined the faculty of Old Dominion University. Over the years, I had the honor to work with wonderful colleagues and students to further explore MISS. Recently, the group of structures was classified as fifth group of microbialites and they are included in the Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology (2023). My husband John Whistler and I enjoy nature photography and hanging out with our cats and dogs.