PhD thesis

8 
Acknowledgements
The endeavour of such a thesis is impossible without the help of many people
for whose support I am very grateful. Foremost I want to thank my principle
supervisor Andreas Wanninger whose office door was always open and who
did a great job in motivating and directing me towards the exciting parts of this
study and especially the publication of the results.
I am grateful to Pedro Martinez and his lab, namely Marta Chiodin, Amandine Bery,
Eduardo Moreno, and Alexander Alsen for an inspiring time in Barcelona.
I thank the teachers I had during PhD courses and who had a great influence on
my thinking about the field of evo-devo, especially Billie Swalla, Ken Halanych,
Alessandro Minelli, and Detlev Arendt.
I thank the colleagues with whom I had the pleasure to share the room, lab,
office, or a beer, Henrike Semmler, Nora Brinkmann, Tim Wollesen, Alen Kristof,
Ricardo Neves, Julia Merkel, Birgit Meyer, Lennie Rotvit, Louise Würtz, Jan
Bielecki, Jens Høeg, Lisbeth Haukrogh, Jan Lybeck, and visiting guests at the
lab in Copenhagen.
A special thank you to Anders Garm who translated the abstract into Danish.
Many thanks go to the staff at the marine stations where I collected animals,
in particular the Friday Harbor Laboratories, the Sven Lovén Centre for Marine
Sciences, the Observatoire Océanologique de Banyuls-sur-mer, and the
Moreton Bay Research Station.
A special thank you goes to my wife Ruth who supported my work wherever
she could and who took especially during the time in Barcelona the “burden” of
caring full time almost alone for our son.
This study was financially supported by a grant from the Danish Agency for
Science, Technology and Innovation (grant no. 645-06-0294 to Andreas
Wanninger) and a travel grant from Friday Harbor Labs to the author for
participation in their summer course.