Manuel Hotz studied Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Konstanz. In 2016 he acquired a Master's Degree in Computer and Information Science for which he received the 'VEUK award' in recognition of academic excellence for one of the best Master's Degrees of 2016. For his Master's Thesis, Manuel designed and developed a hybrid storage layer to unify row- and column-oriented table layouts for RDBMSs. Since joining the Database and Information Systems group as a PhD student in late 2016, he is working on efficient query processing on graph database management systems with a focus on graph traversal queries and indexing techniques.