BACKGROUND

Originally from Germany, Marlene grew up in Esslingen am Neckar and graduated from the University of Stuttgart with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering in 2023. During her undergraduate studies, she had the opportunity to spend a semester at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she started dedicating some of her time to learning about measures to reduce aviation’s climate impact.

Enthusiastic about sports and music, if not in the lab, you can find Marlene running through Boston and Cambridge or broadcasting her own radio show from MIT’s Walker Memorial.

RESEARCH

Marlene’s research focuses on improving our understanding of contrail observability and how this is affected by the physics of contrails, the conditions of the surrounding atmosphere, and the instruments used. As part of the contrail avoidance team, she is also interested in how high-resolution images can improve our contrail observation and detection capabilities in MCAST, LAE’s contrail detection tool, to assess our current estimates of overall contrail coverage.