Sebastian Weichwald, associate professor

Sebastian has a PhD from ETH Zürich in 2019 and has been a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematical Sciences since 2021, associated with the Copenhagen Causality Lab. He is co-lead at the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and on the fellowship evaluation committee of the Danish Data Science Academy.

“Sebastian already has a strong and internationally recognized research profile and great teaching and supervision experience. He is reflective around his teaching methods and has, e.g., rebuilt the Bioinformatics program's statistics course to the students’ great satisfaction,” says Head of Department Mogens Steffensen.

Sebastian’s research is at the intersection of causality, statistics, and machine learning. His work on causal model transformations, which relate concepts of causality and interventions between different representations, and his investigation and improvement of benchmark techniques for causal structure learning are widely recognized. Also inspiring is his commitment to developing high-quality open-source research software, such as the Pymanopt toolbox, commonly used in public and private research organizations.

Mogens Steffensen continues: “Sebastian has been involved in widespread science communication and contributes to the dissemination and lifelong learning to other scientists working in academia and will also be so towards mathematicians and statisticians working in the industry. They can all benefit from his pedagogical skills and expertise in data science and causality. Thus, his profile fits perfectly well with the department’s goals in these directions. Finally, but not least, he contributes to a good working environment and a friendly atmosphere in the department and his section.”