Hi! My name is Annalena (she/her) and I am a PhD student in Machine Learning at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen supervised by Bernhard Schölkopf. I am part of the IMPRS-IS graduate program and the interdisciplinary ELLIS PhD program. Previously, I completed my physics Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). For my Master’s thesis, I was fortunate to be supervised by Lukas Heinrich, Michael Kagan, and Vincent Stimper.

Research Interests

Deep Generative Modelling and Simulation-Based Inference
Automatic Differentiation and Differentiable (Physics) Simulators
Physics: Gravitational Waves, Particle Physics, Characterization of Exoplanets

If you are interested in my work and have questions or ideas, please reach out via email. I’m always motivated to chat!

➡️ You are looking for a Master’s thesis topic at the intersection of ML and physics? Perfect, drop me an email explaining your background, qualifications, and interests. I will try to get back to you quickly.

Teaching

(September 2024) Gave invited lecture and tutorial on normalizing flows at the genAI workshop in Munich
(Summer 2024) Organized seminar Deep Learning for the Natural Sciences at TUM
(Winter 2021/22) Organized and prepared tutorials and student projects for lecture Introduction to Neural Networks for Physics Students at TUM

Talks and Conferences

(January 2025) Gave an invited talk on “Flow Annealed Importance Sampling Bootstrap meets Differentiable Particle Physics” at Nachman Group, Berkley (remote)
(December 2024) Gave spotlight contributed talk on “Flow Annealed Importance Sampling Bootstrap meets Differentiable Particle Physics” at NeurIPS Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences 2024 workshop (Sunday, 2:30 pm)
(December 2024) Presented poster “DINGO: Neural Posterior Estimation for Gravitational Waves” at NeurIPS Women in Machine Learning workshop (Tuesday, 6:30 pm)
(October 2024) Presented poster “DINGO: Neural Posterior Estimation for Gravitational Waves” at the 2nd Tübingen Women in Machine Learning Workshop where I won a WiML NeurIPS travel award for the best poster
(May 2024) Presented poster “DINGO: Neural Posterior Estimation for Gravitational Waves” at the PHYSTAT Workshop on Simulation Based Inference in Fundamental Physics in Munich
(April 2024) Gave overview talk “Neural Posterior Estimation with DINGO” at the AIslands Workshop on the Isle of Arran
(April 2024) Gave presentation about “Neural Posterior Estimation for Gravitational Waves” during my visit to the University of Nottingham
(June 2023) Presented poster at Nordic Probabilistic AI School supported by a full scholarship of DeepMind
(March 2023) Presented Master’s thesis at the annual meeting of the German Physical Society supported by the scholarship of the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation

Reviewing

NeurIPS Workshop Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences 2024 (4 papers)

Community Service

(Since January 2024) Organizer of Athena group meetings and PhD student representative at Gender Equality Committee of MPI-IS Tübingen
(August - December 2024) Organized diffusion model journal club
(November 2023 - June 2024) Served as mentor for ApplicAid
(March 2023 - October 2023) Organized seminar with external speakers for the Origins Data Science Lab
(October 2021 - October 2023) Elected as scholarship representative and committee member for the selection of new scholars of the Heinrich Böll Foundation

Diversity

I actively work towards a welcoming and encouraging environment for people from marginalized groups in physics, ML, and academia in general. In order to be transparent about my learning and contributing journey, I will keep track of the most recent events I attended and/or organized:

(Since August 2024) Mentoring of PhD applicants from underrepresented communities (2024/25: 3 people)
(Since January 2024) Organizer of Athena group meetings and PhD student representative at Gender Equality Committee of MPI-IS Tübingen
(January 2025) Organized #IAMRemarkable Workshop at MPI-IS Tübingen & Stuttgart
(December 2024) Attended 19th WiML workshop at NeurIPS and talks of diversity seminar series at Tübingen MPI campus
(November 2023 - June 2024) Supported students that are disadvantaged in the German education system with their scholarship application through ApplicAid
(March 2024) Participated in “Unconscious Bias Training” offered by the Max Planck Society
(June 2023) Organized and conducted training on “How to deal with sexist comments” (repetition), served on “Women’s advisory board” for workshop “Advocates and Allies: Male Allies for Gender Equality”
(February 2023) Participated in seminar “Diversity as a reference frame for good leadership” by the Institute for Social Justice and Radical Diversity
(November 2022) Organized and conducted training on “How to deal with sexist comments”
(October 2022) Organized “Day of minorities in physics” and “Sharing experiences with sexism”
(March 2022) Attended seminar about classism
(October 2021 - 2022) Served as student representative of equality council at the TUM physics department and organized regular informal meetings for gender minorities in physics
(October 2021) Organized networking event for female physics students at TUM

Since students from marginalized groups face specific challenges and lack support, I decided to exclusively offer mentoring for people from these groups. If you are interested, please contact me via email and explain why you reach out to me, specifically.