I started my academic career with Social and Cultural Anthropology and even though I may have since developed other areas of expertise, the worldview and methods of this field have since refused to let go of me. Personal anthropological topics of interest have been Intentional Communities and Ecovillages, Environmental Anthropology, Health and Economic Anthropology and interreligious encounters.

During my horrendously interdisciplinary graduate program on “Sustainability, Society, and the Environment”, I first built a new expertise in Social Project Management, and Sustainability Communication, and later expanded towards general questions about the issues of sustainability and the so-called “good life for all“. I am since fascinated – and that’s where my anthropological side may be shining through again – with how people define a good life for themselves and how we might be able to facilitate that for as many communities as possible.

At my job for the Falling Walls Foundation, I am following the third passion that currently occupies my life: How we learn and educate. This never truly entered my professional life before starting at this job, but it has always been that little interest that tickled my fancy in one of those ways that’s just really hard to point towards any real reason. Now I am privileged to work with some of the greatest learning and education innovators in the world and to this day I don’t quite know how I got here.

Finally, I have recently been developing a new passion for futurism. This is certainly an extension of the interests I’ve developed in my studies: I am fascinated by desirable futures/utopias, by the ethnographic and design thinking tools (among others) I can wield to learn about them, and by the societal implications of a larger-scale futures literacy.