He studied Human Medicine at the Universities of Cologne and Hamburg between 1993 and 2001 and completed his doctoral thesis in 2003 at the Centre for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg (ZMNH) under Prof. Dr. O. Pongs. Since 2001, he has been working at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), III. Medical Clinic, Nephrology, initially as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and later, from 2010 onwards, as a Research Group Leader. From 2008 to 2010, he held a DFG-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases, Monash University, Australia, under Prof. Dr. Stephen R. Holdsworth.

In 2011, he became a Consultant in Nephrology and Internal Medicine, and in 2012, following his habilitation in Internal Medicine at the University of Hamburg, he was appointed Senior Consultant (Oberarzt) at the UKE. He was a Steering Board Member of the SFB1192 from 2016 to 2023, became APL Professor in 2018, and obtained his Specialist Qualification in Immunology in 2021.