Katharina's Bio

As my real name is quite long, someone abbreviated it to "Katha" a long time ago. Since I might not react to it any more, I always introduce myself as "Katha". When I did my A-levels in Meppen (North Germany) in 2006, I could not decide whether I wanted to do natural sciences or humanities as I somehow liked all subjects in school besides sports and English. Luckily, I had a friend telling me about the awesome study programme "Cognitive Science" in Osnabrueck, which offered an interdisciplinary approach to the brain by integrating mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, neuroinformatics, neuroscience, computational linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology. Though, I was initially interested in psychology and neuroscience, I liked the computer science part most, probably because I learned a lot there. In my second year, I somehow drifted to the field of linguistics after I became teaching assistant in the introductory linguistics class in my third semester. I got stuck in this field such that I even ended up writing a Bachelor's thesis about "Focus marking by speech-accompanying gestures". However, after my semester abroad in Edinburgh in 2008, I realized that linguistics is not what I want to do in the future. Mainly because I wanted to gain a broader understanding of how the brain works and not just how language is processed in the brain. I started to consider philosophy a lot at that time and applied for the cognitive science track in Amsterdam (I wanted to go to the Netherlands and did not really look for programmes outside this great country). After having attended some philosophical conferences, I became desillusionated about what philosophy can teach us about the brain. I read through the content of the obligatory courses in the cognitive science track, did not like what I read (philosophy and linguistics) and wrote a long e-mail to Silke that I would prefer to do the cognitive neuroscience track. Now, I am in the cognitive neuroscience track, thinking about doing more theoretical or computational stuff, which in my eyes is no contradiction to the track as modelling studies are definitely part of cognitive neuroscience. I am especially interested in memory, consciousness and how the brain processes information in general. I can imagine to go into a more mathematical direction for my Master's project and to end up in a Phd in theoretical neuroscience.
As some of you were interested in my "artistic career", you can have a look at what I did here.