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For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by animal behavior and I always knew I wanted to be a biologist. I studied biology up to MSc level at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and then went on to do a PhD at University of Zürich in Switzerland. During my PhD study I worked on the long-distance homing navigation of the Dancing White Lady spider (Leucorchestris arenicola, Sparassidae) which is only found in the Namib Desert in Namibia. For three years I mostly lived at the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre in the middle of the Namib Desert and it is now one of my favorite places to be.

One of the main results of my PhD study was that although the spiders are strictly nocturnal and able to navigate even during moonless nights, vision is still the key sensory modality they rely on. Studying what the animals are doing, and why they are doing it, inevitably leads to the question: how are they actually doing it? The drive to find answers to questions like ”How can these spiders see at night?” and “What are they actually seeing?” have brought me to the Vision Group in Lund where I currently hold a postdoc position.

In addition to the navigating L. arenicola spiders, I also work on the navigational abilities of fast running nocturnal camel spiders Zeria lawrencei, the movement patterns of the very large flightless !Nara cricket Acanthoproctus diadematus, and I have developed a tracking system for real-time tracking of these intriguing animals. A side project on the fog water collecting abilities of Namib Desert Darkling beetles is also ongoing.