After obtaining my PhD from the University of Münster in 2001, I moved to the Rockefeller University in New York, USA, for my post-doctoral training. In 2007, I relocated to Switzerland to establish an independent junior group at the Competence Center of Systems Biology at ETH Zürich, where I was promoted to Assistant professor in 2008 and to Associate Professor in 2010. In 2017, I became full professor at the ETH Zürich. Since 2012, I am serving as the Dean of Education for the Health Science and Technology (HST) curriculum and as the head of the Graduate School for Molecular and Translational Biomedicine (MTB). Since 2016 I am the Dean of Education for Medicine and since 2020 the associate vice president of Medicine at ETH Zürich. I am the current president of the International Conference on the Biochemistry of Lipids (ICBL) and the vice president and president elect of the German Society for Lipid Research (DGF).

I am currently the head of the laboratory of Translational Nutrition Research and our group has been focused on understanding adipose tissue heterogeneity and plasticity and its involvement in metabolic control both at the level of adipocyte precursor cells as well as on the level of mature adipocytes.