I graduated in Animal Production at the University of Leipzig. After an internship in the United States working on a fallow deer farm, I went back to Leipzig and worked at university in a project aimed to analyse heterogenous variances in the Eastgerman dairy cattle population.

Before going to University of New South Wales in Armidale (Australia) as a Visiting Scientist in 1997/98 I spent the three years before with a project established at the University of Halle-Wittenberg to analyse the design of the breeding program of the Saxonian Pig Breeding Association. In May 1998 I finished this project as my PhD-Thesis.

In 1998 and 1999 I worked on different projects (calculation of economic weights in dairy cattle, two-step selection in pigs) as an independent scientific advisor before going for six months to the Volcani Center (Institute of Animal Science) in Israel. Back home in Saxony I started to work for the Saxonian Pig Breeding Association (today's Pig Breeding Association of Middle Germany) in February 2000.