Open positions and application guidelines

Current job offers

  • I will be hiring PhD students for fall 2025. If you are interested, please apply to the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems or the Ellis PhD program (application deadlines each fall).
  • Other than that, you can try to send applications for PhD or Postdoc positions at any time. In case we are interested, we would try to see whether there is any funding opportunity.

Some general rules

  • PhD students: We cannot accept PhD students who do not have a Master degree yet.
  • Interns: We do not accept interns who do not have a Master degree yet.
  • General inquiries: Please also provide all the material mentioned in the application guidelines below if you just want to inquire about internships or future PhD possibilities. It is simply impossible to judge requests if we do not have the full information about you.

Application guidelines

When you apply to our group as an intern, PhD student or Postdoc, please send all material listed below by email to the address mentioned in the job description (or to Ulrike von Luxburg if you do not apply to an official job opening). We are going to ignore any requests that do not contain the full application material listed below. Please refrain from sending non-electronic applications by standard mail.


In a first single pdf file please collect the following information:

  • Curriculum vitae
  • Certificates of your high school degrees (for Germans: Abitur) and your undergraduate degrees (Bachelor, Master; or Vordiplom and Diplom), including transcript of records
  • A letter explaining why you are interested in our research (for PhD candidates and interns) or a research statement about your own past and future research (postdocs)
  • Contact details (link to homepage, email address, phone number) of two or three referees. Note that in order to get unbiased references, we prefer to contact the referees ourselves. So please do not attach their reference letters to your application.
  • If applicable, you may attach your latest thesis or your favorite paper as a second pdf file.

Please give meaningful names to the files (eg, your last name), and make sure that they are not too large (say, not larger than 5 MB).