She is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

In 1993 she finished her Ph.D. there working with Ernst-Detlief Schulze [de][2] with a research project tracking the incorporation of inorganic nitrogen into trees.

In 1996 she returned to the University of Bayreuth and finished her habilitation working on the exchange of carbon dioxide between soils and the atmosphere.

[4] Starting in 1993, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry until she moved to ETH Zurich in 2003 where she is a full professor.

[2] In 2018, she was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited "her pioneering work to understand ecophysiological mechanisms regulating ecosystem carbon dynamics locally, regionally and across diverse ecosystems".