Leibniz-Preis für Philosophin und Informatiker aus Berlin

Brain City Berlin

Twice this year, the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize goes to two scientists in Brain City Berlin. Philosopher Prof. Dr. Barbara Vetter from Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin) and computer scientist Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller from Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) receive Germany’s most important research funding award, each endowed with 2.5 million euros. A total of ten researchers were honoured.

How can possibilities be rethought? For her work on this question, Prof. Dr. Barbara Vetter, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at FU Berlin, has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2025. Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller, head of the “Machine Learning Group” at TU Berlin and co-director of the “Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data” (BIFOLD), received Germany’s most important science award this year as the second Berlin-based researcher. He is regarded as a pioneer in the field of machine learning. In total, ten awards were presented to researchers this year, with 144 proposals submitted.

Prof. Dr. Barbara Vetter is one of three women honored with the Leibniz Prize 2025, alongside literary scholar Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch from Universität Hamburg and Julia Mahamid, Ph.D., from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. As a professor of theoretical philosophy at FU Berlin, she works on a question that sounds abstract yet touches many areas of life. How possibilities can be conceived has occupied philosophy since its beginnings. In her contributions, she challenges the established model of a plurality of possible worlds and proposes an alternative concept that is widely discussed internationally. She is currently working on further developing this approach in terms of action theory and epistemology. “With her work, Vetter helps make Germany an internationally interesting hub for contemporary analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and action theory,” said the jury. Barbara Vetter earned her doctorate at the University of Oxford and has been a professor at FU Berlin since 2017. She is also co-speaker of the DFG research group “Human Abilities” and is active in the governing bodies of national and international scientific institutions.

Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller conducts research at TU Berlin on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a focus on applications in the natural sciences. “Klaus-Robert Müller’s research stands out for combining formal mathematical thinking with a strongly application-oriented approach,” explained the jury in its decision. He has also produced outstanding theoretical and practical work on deep neural networks. Klaus-Robert Müller studied physics at Universität Karlsruhe and earned his doctorate in computer science there in 1992. He then worked as a postdoc at GMD – Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik in Berlin and at the University of Tokyo. From 1995 to 2008, he led a research group at Berlin’s GMD FIRST (since 2001 named Fraunhofer FIRST). In 2003, he accepted a professorship at Universität Potsdam. Since 2006, he has been a professor at TU Berlin and director of BIFOLD.

The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, each endowed with 2.5 million euros, is awarded annually by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to top researchers working in Germany. The recipients can use the funds for up to seven years according to their own ideas and without bureaucratic hurdles. In 2024, two leading Berlin researchers also received the Leibniz Prize: Prof. Dr. Ana Pombo, a genome biologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), and Prof. Dr. Volker Haucke, a biochemist and cell biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP).

The official award ceremony for the Leibniz Prizes 2025 will take place on March 18, 2026, in Berlin. (vdo)

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Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller, Head of the Machine Learning Group at TU Berlin and Co-Director of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). © BIFOLD