My recent & Ongoing Projects
I studied Physics and worked in Systems Engineering and Test Engineering, and since 2025 at navel robotics.
navel robotics GmbH
Developing a "robitic beeing you want to be with"
Role: Systems Engineer
Video by navel robotics (https://navelrobotics.com/en/navel-the-new-empathy-robot-for-good-care/)
Navel Robotics is a Munich-based deep-tech startup developing Navel, a social robot for cognitive and emotional activation in care environments. Founded in 2019 by Claude Toussaint — formerly managing director of a UX agency — the company shipped its pre-series in October 2023 and delivered its 100th robot in March 2026, with daily use across residential care facilities and pilot partnerships at Hannover Medical School, TU Munich, and Evangelische Heimstiftung.
Navel reads social cues through vision and audio and responds with facial expressions, gaze, and an emotional voice. Powered by large language models, it engages residents in open-ended conversation, remembers past interactions, and provides consistent attention without fatigue — qualities that human care reaches its limits on under time pressure. The robot is positioned explicitly as a supplement to caregivers, not a replacement.
Mbition (Daimler) / Accenture Industry X
Scaling automated Test Farm for Infotainment Systems
Role: Systems Engineer / Test Engineer
This is how I see myself prototyping (source: adobe stock)
Test engineers at Mbition (Berlin) validate roughly 8 billion lines of automotive code daily. Flashing each build onto physical vehicles doesn't scale, so cars are emulated by testbenches. Accenture Industry X built a Managed Test Target Farm (MTTF) around this need — a hardware pool with automated daily flashing and test execution — and the engineering challenge was integrating it into Mbition's existing test landscape while keeping it robust against operator error.
As test engineer and IT support for the MTTF, I owned system availability end-to-end: standardized the hardware build, designed connectors that are mechanically incompatible with incorrect insertion, onboarded Mbition engineers to the new workflow, and set up a Jira-based ticketing pipeline to route support requests and surface recurring failure modes.
Renk Magnet-Motor GmbH / Thales Australia
Developing a Power Generation System
Role: Systems Engineer
The Hawkei is a protected military vehicle program worth $1.3 billion AUD, with in-house production of 1,000 units. I worked on the electric propulsion system — a starter/generator with integrated power management unit — across the TRL 6 to TRL 9 transition, i.e. from prototype validation to certified series production.
As System Engineer, I led the EMI engineering team through filter design and MIL-STD-461 certification, and introduced the company's first ISO 26262 functional safety process landscape — previously absent for a product class that now required it. As Process and Documentation Manager, I rebuilt the DOORS requirements database to close traceability gaps between system, subsystem, and component levels, giving engineers a working baseline for development and laying the foundation for downstream PLM integration.
One of my major contributions was building an in-house EMI measurement chamber. Commercial chambers like IABG are expensive and heavily booked, which doesn't fit iterative EMC development. I conceived and led the build of a Faraday-shielded enclosure instrumented to MIL-STD-461 — delivering roughly 95% of the functionality of a commercial reference at about 5% of the cost.
Interferometric detection of cell activity on periodic nano structures
Role: Master's thesis in physics / R&D
Growing human cancer cells on periodic gold nanostructures
Master's Thesis: Own image of a human cancer cell caught in the moment of cell devision (REM image, 5000x magnitude, LMU Munich, 2014)
Challenge
Proving a correlation between the Debye-Waller model in solid-state physics and a perturbation model in biophysics to develop a cost-efficient, lens-free microscopic method for measuring cell activity and performing drug screening.
Approach
Theoretical derivation observed nanostructures under cells using a standard brightfield high-resolution microscope to track the "lensing effect" of cells, with A549 human skin cancer cells as test subjects. Pre-experimental data showed a clear correlation between cell activity and structure displacement, translated using the Debye-Waller model into reciprocal space to measure perturbation intensity on the main Bragg-maxima. The experimental setup included creating a "Bragg-Sky" with nanostructures and measuring the intensity of the second main maxima. This involved selecting appropriate CCD camera sensors, constructing a specialized probe chamber for cell growth, and cultivating A549 cells on SiO2 and gold chips. Cells were observed optically to ensure health, and different confluence levels were used to measure the light intensity correlation of the second Bragg maximum, proving the Debye-Waller model's application to biological matter.
Results
The perturbation of Bragg maxima was directly measurable by light intensity, correlating to cell density on nanostructures. These groundbreaking results led to further experiments with cells and bacteria, culminating in the formation of the startup Phio by my former colleague and supervisor Philipp Paulitschke.