Professional interests
My focus during the Master‘s degree was set on plant protection. However, my fascination for data analysis, modelling and programming in general was increasingly awakened. I am extremely interested in possible innovations that arise from the progressing digitalisation of agriculture.
Education
Master of science (M.Sc.) in agricultural science.
Major in plant science and two minors in data science and technology for agricultural science as well as agricultural economics and policy. In addition to that, due to personal interest, I attended multiple other courses about data science and machine learning.
At the University of California in Davis, I am currently working as an exchange schlar on my master’s thesis in the Digital Agriculture Lab lead by Dr. Alireza Pourreza. For my thesis, I try to remotely sense foliar nitrogen concentrations in almond orchards by using radiative transfer modelling combined with machine learning.
Exchange semester in France as part of the ETH Master‘s programme, which has taken place successively in Montpellier, Rennes and Paris. The focus of this study lied solely on plant protection (Protection des Plantes et Environnement), where the lectures were taught exclusively in French.
Bachelor of science (B.Sc.) in agricultural science.
Bachelor thesis: Phenotypic characterization of biofortified rice (Oryza sativa). Supervised by Prof. Dr. Bruno Studer (Institute of Agricultural Sciences, ETH Zurich) and Dr. Navreet Bhullar (Institute of Molecular Plant Biology, ETH Zurich).
Experience
Currently, I work as a data scientist at the Federal Office for Agriculture.
Student assistant in the agricultural economics and policies group (AECP), roughly 35%. I developed the R package ETH.OLP that facilitates solving linear and non-linear optimization problems for agricultural economics students at ETH Zurich, prepared tasks in R for student assignments and documented the package and assignments in a skript.
Besides my studies, I worked roughly 10% as an editor at Switzerland’s largest agricultural news outlet in Bern, meaning I proof-read the weekly edition of their main newspaper BauernZeitung before it was printed.
Internship in the group of ecological plant protection in arable farming at Agroscope in Reckenholz, Zurich. This included conducting various experiments on induced resistance to Phytophthora infestans in potatoes, corresponding data analysis, preparation and assistance in field applications and cultivation of P. infestans as well as various bacterial strains.