I did a BA double major in Sociology and African-American Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, USA from 1997-2002. Then I worked in the tourism and journalism industries in Lake Tahoe, California, USA from 2002-2006. I returned to academia to do an MA in Sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno from 2006-2008 where I became interested in survey research and in particular the relationship of public opinion and social policy. I used this interest and my MA Thesis (eventually published as a journal article) to write a convincing research proposal that got me a fellowship at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) at the University of Bremen, Germany. There I did my PhD in Sociology from 2009-2013. I then worked as a Postdoctoral researcher at BIGSSS for two years and got another Postdoc at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. During my time at the MZES I became deeply interested in open science and I co-developed a side project to investigate what happens when many independent teams engage in replication and then what happens when many teams test the same data with the same hypothesis. This ‘Crowdsourced Replication Initiative’ became a major undertaking and took much longer than expected. In order to help make the results publicly accessible I received a Freies-Wissen Fellowship (Open Science Fellowship) from the Wikimedia Foundation. During my Postdoc I also developed my first successful German Science Foundation (DFG) grant application on the ‘Reciprocal Relationship of Public Opinion and Social Policy’. As the reviewing procedure took two rounds, my time at the MZES ended and I found a third Postdoc position back at the University of Bremen but this time in their Collaborative Research Center (SFB1342) “The Global Dynamics of Social Policy” in a project coding and analyzing the history of social security laws (pensions, unemployment, work-injury) in 187 countries since 1880. While working on this and my own DFG project, I was awarded a second DFG grant based on my crowdsourced research project on the topic of “The Role of Theory in (Resolving) the Reproducibility Crisis” in social science. I took part in the application process for the 2nd phase of CRC funding and it was successful, thus I am now co-Principal Investigator in the project “Global Dynamics of Coverage and Generosity in Work-Injury Compensation, Unemployment and Old-Age Pensions” aimed at coding the inclusivity and coverage (replacement rates) of the social security laws.