Pia completed her BSc in Physics of the Earth System, providing a background in meteorology and oceanography, at Kiel University and the Geomar Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany. For her MSc, Pia moved to the University of Hamburg to study Integrated Climate System Sciences, with a focus on physical climate sciences.

Pia's PhD project aims to improve our understanding of the interaction between the tropical and extratropical large-scale circulation and their representation in climate models. This will be done by working with nudged experiments that eliminate known tropical biases to identify which regions are critical to influence biases in the extratropics. She also plans to perform further nudged experiments and analyse the link between model biases in the tropics and extratropics in simulations available through CMIP6.