Prof. Dr. Stefan Bauer

Stefan Bauer is an Associate Professor of Algorithmic Machine Learning & Explainable AI at TU Munich and Senior PI at Helmholtz AI. He joined Helmholtz Munich on March 1, 2023, returning to his home region of Munich after an international research career. Stefan studied Mathematics at ETH Zurich and Economics and Finance at the University of London before completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at ETH Zurich in 2018, for which he received the prestigious ETH Medal for outstanding dissertations. After his doctorate, he became a Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen and later an Assistant Professor at KTH Stockholm. He also held visiting researcher positions at MILA (Montreal), GSK, and Microsoft Research. 

His research focuses on developing AI systems that learn causal relationships from high-dimensional data, can explain their decisions, and adapt rapidly to new tasks and environments. These capabilities are key to building robust, trustworthy AI with real-world impact. 

At Helmholtz Munich, Stefan collaborates across disciplines – from single-cell biology to protein design – to apply and advance causal machine learning. He co-coordinates the Helmholtz Foundation Model Initiative, one of Germany’s major national efforts for developing large-scale AI models, and is a CIFAR LMB Fellow (since 2025) and former CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. His publications have received multiple awards, including the Best Paper Award at ICML 2019.