Thank you. Initially, I started out as a journalist, and I've always wanted to become a political journalist. I did a two-year traineeship with a very small local newspaper in the German countryside. I decided to go to university, then I enrolled myself in political science in Mannheim University in Germany, which is a school of empirical social science, actually. Then also became a student assistant to the Chair of International Social Science and Comparative Politics, which also paved the way for doing comparative research all my life. Since I have been a journalist and was working as a journalist, when I studied within those political scientists and other students, I was the media person, which meant that I really focused on all kinds of questions of political communication and media within political science and within political culture studies and so on. Then, this was the time in the mid-80s, when in Germany there was the media revolution, which at the time was the introduction of commercial television. We had public television only. There were new technical infrastructures and commercial television was introduced. That was when there was a lot of research money. My professor got a research grant to study the social consequences of the introduction of commercial television, so after I took my MA degree, I started in this project. I wrote up my PhD dissertation, which was on the political consequences of commercial media use and its impact on political orientations. At the same time, this project was finished because the money ran out, so I had no job anymore. This resulted in the project being incorporated in a big media research center, which at the time was directed by Winfried Schulz who has been, and still is, a very famous communication scholar. Within my PhD project, I ended up in this group of communication scholars and finished my PhD within this framework. Suddenly, my writing was no longer the writing of a political journalist; I was no longer a political scientist, but a media and communication scholar. I had lost my voice as a journalist and ended up as a researcher. I went as a postdoctoral student to Georgetown University in Washington, [DC]. I was still thrilled by political communication and the next idea was to study the interface between media and politics. That was what was puzzling me. So I came to Washington, DC very naively, because I wanted to study what was happening at the White House. I wanted to interview White House journalists and the White House press corps. I had no clue how to get into this group. But luckily, my landlord in Washington went to church with Judy Woodruff, who was a PBS anchor. And he said, "Why don't you speak to her?" And believe it or not, after one year I had 30 interviews with all his White House people and the journalists of the press corps in Washington, DC. Then I went back to Germany and did the same thing in Germany because I knew the person who was heading the Chancellor's press office. I had 60 interviews with these people. And as I was a quantitative empirical scholar, I started to transcribe them and analyzed it in a very complicated content analysis and wrote my second PhD dissertation. After a year, I went back to Mannheim, first as an assistant professor, and then I changed to Berlin, to the science center in Berlin. I ended up in a research unit about social movements in the public sphere. As I had been a political scientist and a communication scholar, I suddenly found myself in a group of public sphere sociologists, which also influenced me very much as I'm now doing more movement studies in public discourse.