Animals and all their specific characteristics and abilities have always been my eternal source of fascination and admiration. My main impulse as a researcher is to understand the evolution, as well as the ecological interactions of species in order to maintain a coexistence with us. Fishes already crossed my path during my master thesis where I had the opportunity to work on a severely understudied fish group that is simultaneously highly threatened. Thanks to this experience I became keenly interested in biodiversity research and aim to contribute to this exciting field by decrypting underlying mechanisms of adaptations of species. Thus, I now feel grateful to be part of a bigger research group, which aims to understand the evolution of fishes and contributing to change their underestimated significance among people.

My PhD topic is embedded in the greater project of our research group which aims to illuminate molecular evolution of sensory systems in teleost fishes. I am contributing to this by mainly investigating the genomics of vision and olfaction in the Mormyridae, also called elephant fishes. Mormyridae are osteoglossomorph fishes occurring exclusively in freshwater habitats of Africa and are best known for their gigantocerebellum and their use of electroreception. However, still far less known is about their other sensory systems and their biology in general. Through the use of whole genome sequencing as well as RNA library preparation and RNA-sequencing on the Illumina platform the presence of genes and the level of gene expression will be uncovered, which in addition could shed light on species-specific differences.