Since April 2022, I am Professor for Clinical Psychology at the Institute of Experimental Psychology of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. My background is in psychology and cognitive neurosciences. In 2009, I earned my PhD at the University of Mannheim, Germany, after which I was a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. Dr. Petra Schweinhardt’s lab at the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain, McGill University, Montreal in Canada. From 2013 onwards, I was a post-doctoral fellow in the group Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Herta Flor at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim in Germany, where I became an independent research group leader in 2016. In 2019, I started a new research group funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SFN, PRIMA) at the Department of Chiropractic Medicine, Balgrist University Clinic at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. I serve as a member of the editorial board for PAIN, Neuroscience Letters, and Frontiers in Pain Research and I am also a member of the Steering committee on the EFIC Research Strategy, the EFIC Working Group for Translational Research, and the IASP Fellowships, Grants, and Awards working group. My work focuses on psychobiological mechanisms of human pain perception in health and disease states. The overarching goal of my work is to characterize neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms of the interaction of pain and reward processing in humans and to identify pathogenetic relevant alterations of these processes in patients with chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease, and mitochondrial disorders. To investigate these mechanisms, my research group uses and combines various methodological approaches such as behavioral testing, pharmacological interventions, and neuroimaging techniques as well as computational modelling.