Claire Vernade

Claire Vernade is a Group Leader at the University of Tübingen in the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning for Science. She leads an active research group focused on theoretical aspects of sequential decision making, with particular expertise in bandit problems and reinforcement learning theory. Her work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in scientific discovery.

Her research interests span sequential decision making, bandit problems, theoretical Reinforcement Learning, Learning Theory, and principled learning algorithms. She has made significant contributions to understanding non-stationary environments, lifelong learning frameworks, and the theoretical foundations of bandit algorithms. Her work on "Eigengame: PCA as a Nash Equilibrium" received an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2021.

Dr. Vernade has been awarded prestigious grants including an Emmy Noether award (2022) for her FoLiReL project and an ERC Starting Grant (2024) for her ConSequentIAL project. Her current ERC project explores the role of Reinforcement Learning in developing Continual Learning agents, with applications to scientific domains like drug discovery and micro-chemistry.

• Emmy Noether award under the AI Initiative call (2022)
• ERC Starting Grant (2024)
• Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2021

She currently supervises three PhD students and actively recruits postdocs and PhD candidates through the IMPRS-IS and ELLIS doctoral programs. Her group collaborates extensively with the broader machine learning community, organizing workshops like FoRLaC at ICML 2024 and serving as co-chairs for tutorials at major conferences. Dr. Vernade is also deeply committed to diversity and inclusion in machine learning, co-leading initiatives like Women in Learning Theory and Tübingen Women in Machine Learning.