Marie-Lou is a DPhil candidate in Politics working on non-citizen voting rights in the United Kingdom. Her doctoral research is jointly funded by the Grand Union DTP (Economic and Social Research Council) and the David Butler Scholarship. Before starting her DPhil, she completed her Bachelor's and Master's in Political Science at the University of Mannheim with a specialisation in elections, quantitative methods, and survey research. She was a visiting student at the University of Sheffield, UK, where she focused on economic inequality and voting behaviour. 

Alongside her studies, Marie-Lou has been a research assistant at the Chair of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, the German Internet Panel in Mannheim, and the Department of Statistics at LMU. In 2018 and 2020, she taught tutorials in Empirical Political Research at the University of Mannheim.

Her substantive work focuses on public opinion, elections and voting. Marie-Lou is especially interested in temporary disenfranchisement and explores the opportunities and risks of partial eligibility for underage citizens and non-citizens. Methodologically, she is interested in quantitative and computational methods, quasi-experimental designs and the new data collection methods using social media and APIs.