Research

This is a high-level picture of my academic journey and research interests; please see my CV for a formal listing of my previous positions.

Research Interests

I’m a curiosity-driven, systems-engineering physicist. Combining my experience in physics, low and high level software/firmware engineering, electronics and systems design, I build integrated experimental systems. Most recently, the questions that occupy my mind are:

How do we close the loop between experiments and data analysis?

That is: how to integrate decision-making into the experiment, and not just offline in between separate experimental runs? I am developing microfluidic sorters that perform online inference on the millisecond scale, and want to expand this to control of the entire experimental apparatus.

What do physical world models look like that go beyond the second ‘L’ in LLMs?

Especially across domain-specific solutions. What frameworks do we need to build to enable this? I think computational architectures that encode physical reality more token-efficiently are needed for further progress.

Is consciousness one of several emergent properties of intelligence, or simply a human-biased description of agentic behaviour?

My answer is the second, and I enjoy being challenged on this.

Finally, I strongly believe that research is best communicated in dialogue: please get in touch if you want to know more or share your thoughts on any of the above.

Research Career

2025: ASPIRE Programme (University of Tokyo)

International collaboration

The research I started during my JSPS fellowship continues by support of the ASPIRE research grant. I spent two months in the UK (Oxford, Birmingham, Glasgow) to foster international collaborations as part of a research effort to improve artificial photosynthesis efficiency, while developing additional sorting platforms based on the knowledge gained previously.

2023: JSPS Research Fellowship (University of Tokyo)

Real-time ML-classification for high-throughput, information-dense microfluidic sorting

After graduating with my PhD, a JSPS Research Fellowship (via nomination from the UK Royal Society) allowed me to join the Ota Laboratory at RCAST, University of Tokyo. My research here centres around developing and applying high-throughput screening methods enabled by online ML analysis on top of microfluidic sorting. This builds on the skills I’ve acquired during my PhD together with my background in electronics and hardware-adjacent programming.

until 2023: PhD (University of Cambridge)

Label-free optical detection methods in photonic crystal fibres

I graduated with my PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2023. For a quick visual introduction, here’s the graphical abstract of my PhD dissertation:

Graphical abstract
(Link to PDF version)

In brief, the research of my PhD involved a new class of optofluidic waveguides called hollow-core photonic crystal fibres. These custom-designed glass fibres, around as thick as a human hair, surround a sub-50 μm fluid channel with microstructures as thin as the wavelength of light. This confinement of light by anti-resonant interference leads to strong light-matter interaction. We used these properties to collect and guide ultraviolet light across tens of centimeters of protein solution, while still being in the nL regime: optofluidic nano-pipettes. In my PhD, I designed, assembled and carried out biophysical experiments based on these techniques, enabling us to analyse quantities as small as a single drop, and work with label-free protein solutions within continuously-flowing microfluidic circuits. If this made you curious and you would like to read the full dissertation, please email me and I am happy to provide a copy.

Before the PhD

2015: Double-degree scholarship (M.A.) at Keio University and MLU
2012: Royal Holloway, University of London with a Studienstiftung scholarship
2011: Abitur in Germany

While Physics remains my main interest, I kept my interest in the humanities, so feel free to reach out in that regard, too. I studied the history and philosophy of science in Japanese with a scholarship before my PhD; see my CV for more details on this and other pre-PhD activities.

Publications

You can find a record of my publications in the usual listings:

If you do not have access to any of these publications, please feel free to email me to request a copy.

Patents

Patents based on research have been submitted or are currently in preparation (to be published here once they are made public).

Research groups

Finally, to get a broader view, please do have a look at the varied science happening in the research groups I was or am part of: