At the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), Patrick leads PROVAIDE (Provenance and Dissemination Pathways of Disinformation with AI-Assisted Evidence Checking), a collaborative three-year research and development project funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The project aims to develop AI-assisted tools to help journalists trace the origin of information, map its dissemination pathways, and assess whether it forms part of a coordinated disinformation campaign.

In addition, he leads the annual study "Feindbild Journalist:in", which provides a systematic analysis of violence against journalists, protection and support mechanisms, and other forms of media freedom violations in Germany. Within this broader work, he pays particular attention to local journalism, especially in contexts shaped by far-right mobilisation and hostility toward the press.

His overall research interests focus on disinformation, press freedom, and democratic erosion in Europe, with particular attention to how violations of media freedom both reflect and actively reinforce broader authoritarian dynamics.

Patrick holds a PhD from the University of Hamburg. He was a guest researcher at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and a research assistant at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in the DFG-funded project "The (In)stability of Presidential Term Limits in Africa and Latin America". He has teaching experience in the fields of democratisation and autocratisation at the University of Hamburg.