The group has members at three locations: At Potsdam University’s chair of AI in the Sciences, at Technische Universität (TU) Berlin as part of an ERC Starting Grant, and the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Data Science in Jena.
Prof. Dr. Jakob Runge (Chair of AI in the Sciences at the University of Potsdam)
Jakob Runge heads the Causal Inference group as a Professor of AI in the Sciences at the University of Potsdam. Jakob studied physics at Humboldt University Berlin and obtained his PhD at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in 2014. For his studies, he was funded by the German National Foundation (Studienstiftung) and his thesis was awarded the Carl-Ramsauer prize by the Berlin Physical Society. In 2014, he won a Fellowship Award in Studying Complex Systems by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and joined the Grantham Institute, Imperial College, from 2016 to 2017. In 2020, he won an ERC Starting Grant with his interdisciplinary project CausalEarth. [Picture © Thomas Röse]
For his personal website see here. On https://github.com/jakobrunge/tigramite.git he provides Tigramite, a time series analysis Python module for causal inference.
Postdocs
Dr. Urmi Ninad (U Potsdam)
Urmi is a theoretical physicist by training and started in the group within the ERC project CausalEarth. Her interests include causal inference for multi-domain and non-stationary data and spatiotemporal complex systems. Urmi obtained a Bachelor’s degree in physics from St. Stephen’s College at Delhi University. She went on to get a Master’s and doctoral degree in physics at the University of Bonn. Since October 2021, she has been part of the Causal Inference Lab in TU Berlin, since 2025 she works at U Potsdam.
Rebecca Herman, PhD (U Potsdam)
Rebecca is a climate scientist who works on spatiotemporal causal inference as part of the ERC project CausalEarth. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in pure math and physics at UC Berkeley. She went on to get a Master’s and doctoral degree in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University (USA). Since 2022, she has been part of the Causal Inference group.
Dr. Martin Rabel (U Potsdam)
Martin is a mathematician and theoretical physicist, working on causal inference in the context of anomalies and climate extremes, with a special interest in ML.
Martin studied physics and obtained a doctoral degree in mathematics, both at Heidelberg University, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung). He joined the causal inference group in 2023, and since June 2024, he has been part of the Causal Inference Group.
PhD students
Wiebke Günther (TU Berlin)
Wiebke’s background is in mathematics and quality assessment of neural networks. She is working on causal inference methods for non-gaussian and non-stationary data distributions within the HGF project CausalFlood as well as CausalEarth. Wiebke studied mathematics at Humboldt University Berlin from 2013 onwards and obtained her Master’s degree in 2019. In 2022, she joined the Causal Inference group at DLR and is now at TU Berlin as a PhD student.
Simon Bing (U Potsdam)
Simon is a computer scientist and engineer working on causal representation learning for climate data. He is interested in developing unsupervised machine learning algorithms, which are informed by physical knowledge, to learn causal representations of spatio-temporal climate data. The goal is to obtain representations from high-dimensional data that lend themselves to causal modelling and reasoning, ultimately improving our understanding of the underlying dynamics of the climate system. Simon obtained his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2019 followed by his master’s degree in robotics in 2022, both from ETH Zürich. In July 2022, he joined the group as a PhD student.
Oana-Iuliana Popescu (U Potsdam)
Oana joined as a PhD student in June 2022 with the goal of developing AI-based methods for causal discovery and inference. She is especially interested in explainable AI, a topic she has been pursuing since her Master’s degree in 2019. She is working on the XAIDA project to develop and apply algorithms for the detection of extreme weather events. Oana studied Computer Science at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena.
Alexandrine Lanson (U Potsdam)
Alexandrine joined the group as a PhD student in January 2024 and works on developing and applying causal inference methods to data with abrupt transitions. She focuses on climate data with the goal of better describing and predicting tipping elements and their interactions in the climate system. She holds a master’s degree in physics and climate science from Ecole Polytechnique (France) and in data science from ENSAE (France).
Sofia Faltenbacher (U Potsdam)
Sofia holds a Master’s in mathematics from TU Berlin with a focus on stochastics and applied mathematics. After working as a student assistant, she continued in the group as a PhD student.
Further members at DLR Jena
Jakob Runge is the doctoral advisor of these PhD students, the DLR group is now headed by Andreas Gerhardus.
Tom Hochsprung (PhD student at DLR Jena)
Tom studied mathematics and statistics at TU Munich where he obtained his master’s degree in 2021. He works at the intersection between causal inference and statistics. He joined the Causal Inference group at DLR in 2022.
Former members
Jonas Wahl (group head at DFKI Berlin)
Nicolas-Domenic Reiter (postdoc at TU Munich)
Andreas Gerhardus (group head at DLR Jena)
Rafael Westenberger (industry)
Sagar Nagaraj Simha (PhD candidate in Amsterdam)
Christoph Käding (industry)
Xavier-Andoni Tibau (United Nations)
Violeta Teodora (FSU Jena)
Christian Requena Mesa (Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena)
Christian Reimers (Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena)
Michael Niebisch (industry)
Kenneth Styppa (student)
