FIAS Director Jan Wörner gave a Christmas lecture entitled “Advent in the Universe.” He reflected on the period from the creation of the universe over the course of a year and the Advent season, right up to an outlook for the new year.

Xia Xu defended his thesis in the group of Jochen Triesch on December 10. He studied how infant-inspired learning can lead to the next level of developmental AI.

Zhengyang Yu finished his PhD in the group of Jochen Triesch on December 10th. “We hope to build a bridge between infant vision and deep learning,” Yu says. In his PhD thesis he shows that representation learning can benefit from the same kind of natural, continuous visual experience that toddlers gain through active, self-directed exploration. By replacing traditional data augmentation with temporally adjacent frames from real visual play sequences, his self-supervised model learned robust object representations comparable to those achieved with full supervision.

Experiments with tiny particles of large mass—such as compressed baryonic matter (CBM)—are an important pillar of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. The CBM experiment at the FAIR accelerator will record up to ten million heavy ion collisions per second. Under these conditions, an online trigger is required to select events that may contain signatures of quark-gluon plasma. In his dissertation, supervised by FIAS Fellow Ivan Kisel, Artemiy Belousov investigated how neural-network approaches can support this task.

Felix Weiglhofer's dissertation, supervised by FIAS Senior Fellow Volker Lindenstruth, addresses the question of how large amounts of data can be processed in real time. It enables rare particle interactions to be recorded and analyzed—and thus provides insight into the microseconds after the Big Bang.

More accurate predictions of epidemics are important for combating infectious diseases and protecting public health. A research team at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) for this purpose. It combines classic models of disease spread with modern deep learning methods to better capture differences in the temporal and spatial progression of an epidemic.

Tom Olsen developed a novel method to compute radiation transport and radiation-matter interaction in the context of strong gravity and high energy physics. The dissertation was supervised by FIAS Senior Fellows Volker Lindenstruth and Luciano Rezzolla.

Today, Armin van de Venn successfully completed his doctorate under the supervision of FIAS Fellow Jürgen Struckmeier - "summa cum laude". His extension of established mathematical frameworks opens up new perspectives on the deep structure of spacetime and the origin of the cosmos.

The PhD symposium connected to the Bernstein Conference was once again held at FIAS. This year's spotlight was the topic of consensus: Where do we agree, where don’t we, and why does it matter? The path to this question was a hackathon in which participants analyzed a data set in small groups and discovered that different answers to a scientific question can be found depending on the perspective and interpretation.

Biological brains are extremely energy-efficient. Can artificial intelligence learn a few tricks from them? Researchers at FIAS and colleagues from France describe new findings on energy-efficient information processing in the journal Nature Communications.

FIAS Fellows Roberto Covino and Sebastian Thallmair introduced the audience at the FIAS Forum to the world of computer models. Using clear and vivid imagery, they described how digital twins open up new avenues for research into cellular and health-related processes.

Chen Li from the research group of FIAS Senior Fellow Horst Stöcker successfully defended his doctoral thesis on September 22, 2025. Using machine learning algorithms, he optimized decision-making problems in power grid models that arise due to fluctuations in renewable energies.

A team around doctoral student Francisco M. López from the group of FIAS Senior Fellow Jochen Triesch won the “Babybot Paper Award.” It was presented at the International Conference on Development and Learning in Prague and honors publications that establish a connection between developmental psychology and robotics and/or computer-aided modeling.

Shuai Han from the research group of FIAS Senior Fellow Horst Stöcker successfully defended his doctoral thesis on September 22, 2025. He investigated a novel integration of mechanistic epidemic models with modern deep learning to achieve both high predictive accuracy and crucial interpretability in epidemiological forecasts.

Nobel Prize winner Ben L. Feringa fascinated over 130 guests (and several online listeners) with his lecture “The Art of Building Small” on the occasion of the presentation of the Senior Fellow Laureatus Award. He took them on a journey into the tiny world of molecular motors in our bodies.

Seeing is more than light hitting the retina — it is the result of a finely tuned interplay between networks of neurons. A new study by researchers at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and international partners shows how the brain learns to reliably process visual stimuli after the eyes open. With experience, incoming signals become more precise and increasingly aligned with internal circuits — a process that enables stable visual perception. These insights could inform advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and therapeutic approaches.

FIAS doctoral student Gianmarco Lazzeri achieved an outstanding victory a the Goethe Run 2025 on August 27! He finished the 5.6 km course in 18:33 minutes, securing first place. Also competing for FIAS was Artemiy Belousov, who finished 30th with a strong performance and great determination. We congratulate both runners on their outstanding results!

We warmly congratulate Mingjun Xiang on successfully defending her PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt and in the FIAS group of FIAS Fellow Kai Zhou.

FIAS is part of a successful application of Goethe University for the Hessian State Initiative for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence (LOEWE). The new LOEWE cluster Lipid Space investigates the role of lipophilic substances in tissue self-regulation and is funded with €4.3 million Euro.

Carlo Giersch, long-time supporter and sponsor of FIAS, visited FIAS on July 16 together with the Hessian Minister of Science and Research, Timon Gremmels.