Ulrike Pfreundt

The driver of everything I’ve ever done is a deep curiosity and wonder for the natural world around me. The tropics and their immense biodiversity captivate me—whether it’s rainforests or coral reefs. Over the past 13 years, my scientific work has focused on understanding life in the nutrient-poor oceans of the tropics. Today, my desire to explore life in tropical oceans has evolved into a personal quest to protect what I love. With knowledge came responsibility. With knowledge came a clear understanding of how fragile tropical coastal ecosystems are today – first and foremost coral reefs.

To help coral reefs survive this century, I co-founded an association and an impact startup – rrreefs. We are focused on two major objectives, the first, to develop a reef-repair system that effectively restores the immense biodiversity of coral reefs, now tested in 4 different oceans. This system bridges the current gap between scalability and easy usability, even in remote areas and diverse local contexts. 

The second one is to crack the code of coral reef sounds with a 2-year long cross-Pacific expedition. This work will hopefully lead to an accessible, sensor-based method to monitor reef health globally, enabling organizations and governments to assess their reefs more continuously and detect warning signs early on.

My greatest hope for the future is collaboration. I believe that by talking to each other, by combining our knowledge and solutions, by sharing our experiences in pushing the boundaries and doing things that are new and bold, we can all help each other to safeguard a healthy planet with healthy people.

I am deeply shaped by the German Palatinate Forest I grew up in, and by my mother’s curiosity and love of nature. She is an incredible woman and studied biologist and showed my sisters and me the world of small animals around our house, able to name every single one of them.

My fascination for the diversity of wild life with which we share this planet, has started back then, because of her. This fascination led me into a search for knowledge, and soon the idea of eco-systems, systems of tightly connected and interdependent living beings, was totally intuitive to me. Watching whole ecosystems disappear deeply saddened me and made me want to help. Lucky enough, my father is an applied mathematician and computing specialist, who never got tired of encouraging his daughters to think systematically and with logic. His enthusiasm for science and technology, seeing how much he loved and embraced his work, probably led me to pursue a scientific career of my own, to try and understand what I loved.

The only missing big piece of the puzzle was the ocean. My family was never particularly ocean-enthusiastic, apart from the occasional holiday. But through everything else my parents had given me, my curiosity and love for the underwater world naturally developed, simply because it was new, exciting, and plentiful. I started diving into it deeper and deeper, and when I surfaced, my mission was clear.