Research
Exploring wholesome states, traits and spaces.
My work and life revolve around fostering environments that support healthy states, traits and spaces – within ourselves and with each other. This journey has taken me from studying the mind and brain to exploring how we collaborate and create meaningful change together.
Currently
GemeinschaftsBildung — a Living Lab for belonging, community and cooperative learning
Universities are not only places where knowledge is transmitted. They are social spaces, and the learning and relational cultures that form in them shape the whole of a degree. The research on this topic is quite clear: students who feel they belong, and who are embedded in cooperative structures, learn better, stay motivated, and are more likely to finish their studies. And yet community at a university is rarely studied or designed on purpose. This is where our project comes in.
GemeinschaftsBildung is a participatory action research and development project run together with students, teaching staff and administrators. The goal of the project is to research and strengthen belonging, community and cooperative learning at Freie Universität (FU). In the first phase we mapped how community and belonging are currently lived at the FU today and where they could grow. This first phase consisted of interviews, workshops and co-creative formats.
The findings will then feed directly into concrete interventions, which we will be testing from the winter semester 2026/27 in the first-semester phase of the Political Science BA at the Otto-Suhr-Institut. The beginning of a degree is a formative moment with a great deal of room to shape it. Whatever proves itself is meant to be embedded permanently in teaching, and extended to other departments.
So far this has produced a set of interviews across all three groups, a series of field-exploration workshops, a working group on the first-semester phase, and a workshop as part of Wissenschaft gegen Faschismus asking why belonging and community are among our strongest defences against it.
- Led byProf. Dr. Thomas Rixen (Otto-Suhr-Institut), Dr. Katja Reinecke (Dahlem Center for Academic Teaching) and Nicolas Endres
- Funded byStabsstelle Nachhaltigkeit und Energie, Freie Universität Berlin
- RunningApril 2026 to March 2027
- Read moreProject page at the FU · Analysis report (PDF) · Findings presentation (PDF)
Developing teaching formats that include emotion and the body
A second strand, closely related. Together with Prof. Dr. Thomas Rixen I design and teach seminars in political economy that deliberately bring experiential and mindfulness-based methods into the curriculum. Students work on topics like the polycrisis, post-growth, commons and regeneration as theory, and at the same work with bodily, emotionally, and relational experiences.
Furthermore, the second seminar focussed on having (re)generative dialogues aimed at honest expression, deep listening and generating outcomes. For more detail go to the teaching page.
Earlier research
Towards the measure of all things – Why we need to apply the scientific method directly to the mind.
My master’s thesis, and still the clearest statement of what I think the problem is. It argues that a science of consciousness which refuses to take first-person data seriously has ruled out most of its own evidence, and works through what a rigorous first-person method would actually require — the training, the safeguards, the ways it could go wrong.
- SupervisorsProf. Dr. Arno Villringer and Dr. Marisa Przyrembel
- Submitted7 July 2017
- Read itFull text (PDF)
The ReSource Project
I worked as an assistant scientist at the Berlin satellite lab of the Max Planck Institute, mostly within the ReSource Project — one of the largest longitudinal studies ever conducted on the effects of meditation. Participants trained different mental faculties over the course of a year while the study tracked what changed, in the brain and in behaviour. In this study I did not only learn about meditation and conducting large-scale experiments but also met many amazing neuroscientists, psychotherapists and meditation teachers, many of which I am still friends with to this day.
The Berlin Microsolidarity Project
The Berlin Microsolidarity Project was an action research project consisting of a hybrid live/remote programme of workshops and gatherings that introduced Berlin’s community weavers to Microsolidarity in Spring 2023 by Jocelyn Ames, Nicki Endres, Karl Steyaert and Felipe Pereira. You can find out more in this article by Julia Karmo about Jocelyn’s and my unfiltered learnings from designing and running this program captured in an open session at the Micrsolidarity Winter retreat 2024.
What We Agree On
An experiment in collective sense-making. Participants worked through contested topics using a bottom-up process supported by polis, the open-source tool for mapping where a group actually agrees rather than where it argues. The aim was to find out whether small groups could reliably locate their own consensus — and whether that consensus could then be built on rather than relitigated.
More info and further resources can be found here.
Biofeedback research
I worked as researcher and adviser on the development of a novel biofeedback algorithm and a physical toy built around it with the aim of making interoception and self-regulation more accessible and fun for the general public.
Artistic research
Becoming Sound
Becoming Sound is an applied artistic research collaboration at the intersection of art, science, technology and practice. In this transdisciplinary endeavor we combine knowledge and principles from sound design, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and astronomy. Becoming Sound is an immersive, interactive experience powered by the human voice and enhanced by technological means. A shared psychedelic mode is created with/through embodied experience focusing on audio-haptic perception. The three-person set up facilitates an artistic mode oscillating between voicing, listening to oneself, your peers and (environ-)mental sounds. The setup of listening and feeling opens a space for vibrational empathy and connection. We use planetary cosmic sound frequencies as a meditational anchor to tune the chanting, similar to tuning a radio to a naturally occurring frequency. The simple aim of this experience is becoming sound.
Exhibited at the INSIGHT conference in 2023 and elsewhere since.
The Becoming Sound app – Vibrational meditations to relax, release and regenerate
Becoming Sound is a space for vibrational meditations that combine chanting with immersive sound journeys, designed to relax your nervous system, release stress, and reconnect you to your inner self.
Created by a team of psychologists, musicians, and meditation teachers, the app blends ancient wisdom with modern science. For millennia, cultures around the world have used chanting and toning to calm the mind, soothe the body, and enter deep states of meditation. Today, research confirms these benefits — regular chanting can support deep relaxation, emotional release, and healing from trauma, as well as reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, and improve overall well-being.
Physiologically, chanting slows your breath and heart rate, stimulates the vagus nerve, and helps your body shift from a state of stress into rest and restoration. It’s also a powerful way to cultivate present-moment awareness: focusing on your voice, its vibrations, and your emotional landscape can help release tension and unlock a profound sense of connection.
The Becoming Sound app offers a variety of sound journeys tuned to specific frequencies. Each track is designed to resonate with different parts of your body and being, allowing you to explore and experiment with what feels most supportive.
Chanting with these soundscapes can help shift old emotional patterns, express unspoken feelings, and restore a sense of vitality and balance. With regular practice — even just fifteen minutes a day — you may find a deepening sense of peace, clarity, and openness emerging in your life.
Ultimately, this practice invites you to dissolve into sound itself. As the Yoga Sutras teach, with steady practice and the right intention, chanting can open the door to a state where there is no more separation, no more inner and outer, self and other — there is only sound, only OM. So by continuously practicing you can truly become sound.
Collaborate
I am always interested in talking to people working on adjacent questions, in higher education, in consciousness research or in building the conditions for generative social fields. If that is you, write to me.