---

Susanne Seitz (Intern 2013, Technician 2014-2015)
Susi came to us as an intern while finishing her Master's degree at the University of Hohenheim and returned as a technician after her studies. As an intern at the MPI, she made a series of cool video-playback experiments to look at mate choice in nine-spined sticklebacks. More recently she has been assisting experiments concerning the effects of estrogen contamination on behavior and gene expression in sticklebacks. She has left the fish world and is now working on her Ph.D at the Helmholtz Center in Munich (Helmholtz Zentrum München) in the Institute for Diabetes and Cancer. In her phd she's working on the correlation of endocytosis and glucose metabolism in mice and human cells focusing on metabolic diseases (e.g. diabetes). She likes traveling, dancing, kite-boarding and even speaks Icelandic!

---

Verena Tams (Research Technician 2013-2014)
Verena received her Diploma (M.Sc. Biology) from the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel. Before joining us at the MPI, Verena worked as research assistant on several projects at GEOMAR in Kiel and sailed half way around the world as an instructor and sailor in "classroom under sails" on the tallship Thor Heyerdahl. She's very interested in ecological and evolutionary aspects of biological diversity and is currently working on her Ph.D at the University of Hamburg. Her goal is to dig deeper in population genetics and to unravel the influence of local adaptation on the intraspecific variation in Daphnia galeata. Her obsession with the marine environment leads her to spend her free time underwater diving (she's logged over 1000 dives!) or above water sailing or traveling to exotic places.

---

Franziska Zahn (Intern 2014)
Franzi joined us on the summer mesocosm experiments in 2014 as an intern. Last autumn she moved to Freiburg to study geography. On the weekends she explores the fantastic area around Freiburg with friends and during the week she spends quite a lot of time sitting in a little cafe after attending lectures.

---

Julia Keller (Intern 2014)
Julia joined us on the summer mesocosm experiments in 2014 as an intern. She recently graduated from High School and now is taking gap year in Berlin before starting her studies at the Connecticut College in New London Conneticut (USA). She wants to gear her studies toward humanitarian efforts and hopes to join the Peace Corps in the future.

---

Sophie Bodenstein (Research Technican 2012-2014)
Sophie received her Diploma (M.Sc. Biology) from the Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel investigating the impacts of climate change on the development of embryos and larvae of Atlantic herring. Her research interests are larval fish ecology, fisheries and sustainable aquaculture and is currently doing a Ph.D at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel on fish - introduced crayfish interactions. In her leisure time she loves sailing, photography, and fishing (more or less successfully).

---

Julian Buchholtz (Bachelor's Thesis student 2013)
While at the MPI, Julian conducted his Bachelor's thesis project on morphometrics of nine-spined sticklebacks in northern German lakes and streams and also helped us on the mesocosm project in 2012 and 2013. Julian is currently completing his Masters degree in Diversity and Evolution at Rostock University. He also works on a project for the protection of sea turtles in northern Cyprus.

---

Dilyana Mihaylova (Intern 2013)
Dilyana joined us for work on the mesocosm project in 2013. She finished her Masters degree in applied ecology and conservation in a program which splits her time between the University of East Anglia (England), the University of Kiel (Germany) and the University of Poitiers (France). Her Masters thesis work conerned the impacts of marine plastic pollution and is interested in the great pacific garbage patch. For more information read this book Moby Duck by Donovan Hohn. She is now a project officer of the Conservation Science Team of Fauna & Flora International and helping to develop FFI's marine plastics program.

---

Emilija Emma (Intern 2012)
Emilija joined us for mesocosm field work during the spring and summer 2012 and worked on developing RSCA genotyping for MHC in nine-spined sticklebacks in an independent research project. Emilija graduated with a BA in zoology at the University of Cambridge and now works on substainability. Her plan is to get paid for doing something that has anything to do with saving the world from an extinction crisis.

---

Ben Weigel (Research Technician 2012)
Ben joined us for mesocosm fieldwork during the summer 2012 after finishing his Diploma studies (M.Sc.) in Biological Oceanography at GEOMAR in Kiel. There he specialized in benthic ecology and the influence of global change on marine communities. Now Ben is in the third year of his PhD studies at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, where he is passionately working on zoobenthos and its functions. His work centers on the role of benthic fauna in the coastal food web under future climate change impacts. By using a long-term data from the Åland archipelago (N Baltic Sea), he’s studying spatiotemporal trends in biomass progression (production), biological traits (functional diversity), and food web models (trophic status) of coastal zones under climate-change scenarios for the region. His position is part of the Nordic Centre for Research on Marine Ecosystems and Resources under Climate Change (NorMER), a Nordic Center of Excellence. He is defending his Ph.D in March 2017, congrats Ben! Ben also plays guitar, likes listening to music and likes traveling to new and exciting places.