She received her doctoral degree from the Free University of Berlin and was an Assistant Professor at the Ruhr-University in Bochum in Germany. In 2002 she was awarded a fellowship from the German Research Foundation to work at Stanford University. Her main areas of interest include the identification of cognitive risk factors for depression, research on the comorbidity of anxiety and depression, and research on social anxiety disorder. Her current work examines attention and memory processes in depression and how these are linked to rumination and emotion dysregulation. In her work, she integrates a multitude of measures, including cognitive tasks, psychophysiological measures of stress reactivity and regulation, eye tracking, neuroendocrine assessments, genotying, and brain imaging. She is currently an Associate Editor of Journal of Abnormal Psychology.