I was born in 1975 in the small town of Henley in the Thames valley in England. Shortly after, my family and me moved to the Lake Constance in the South of Germany. We lived there for seven years, before moving to Oldenburg in the North-West.

There, I finished school in 1994 and started my studies which I continued at the Freie Universität Berlin. I spent the academic year 1998/99 at Warwick University, England, where I completed an MA in Social and Political Thought. In 2000, I finished my Diplom in political science in Berlin.

The same year, I started to work as an academic assistant for sociological theory at the Universität Stuttgart, Germany. There, I finished my doctorate in sociology at the Universität Stuttgart, Germany, in 2007. In my doctorate thesis, I have applied a network theoretical perspective on the integration process of labor migrants, and tested this perspective drawing on a survey of 147 Italian migrants in Germany.

After finishing my doctorate in spring 2007, I went to spend a year as a visiting scholar at the Paul Lazarsfeld Institute for the Social Sciences at the Columbia University, New York. In 2008, I went back to Stuttgart as a fellow and research associate at the International Center for Cultural and Technological Research (IZKT) at the Universität Stuttgart. My work at Columbia and at the IZKT was financed by the German Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation as a post-doctoral Feodor-Lynen-fellowship.

Starting in October 2009, I currently work as an academic assistant at the Faculty of Sociology, Universität Bielefeld, at the chair of political sociology (Prof. Boris Holzer).

In September 2008, Sophie Muetzel and I organized an international symposium on Relational Sociology: Transatlantic Impulses for the Social Sciences with Dirk Baecker, Rainer Diaz-Bone, Stephan Fuchs, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Harrison White and others as speakers at the Humboldt University in Berlin. A publication of the proceedings is being planned for February 2010.

In May 2009, Christian Stegbauer and I organized a small conference on Culture and technologies of communication in social Networks at the International Center of Cultural and Technological Research, Universität Stuttgart. We are currently preparing an edited volume on the topic (to be published in summer 2010).

Apart from my academic work, I am an enthusiastic player of Ultimate Frisbee, having played for various German, English, and American teams for the past 11 years.
I am also a very political person, and have been active in politics in the local party committee (Kreisvorstand) of the German Greens and in the regional work group on the politics of higher education in Bade-Württemberg.