She studied economics at the universities of Munich and Bonn and then joined the IMPRS (The International Max Planck Research School on Adapting Behavior in a Fundamentally Uncertain World) at the location Max-Planck-Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn. In 2012 she visited the University of California, San Diego. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Cologne in 2014. As a research associate, she worked at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg and became a permanent visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn.