Senior Scientist at ETHZ

contact details:
Department Mathematik
Rämistr. 101
8092 Zürich, Switzerland
carina.geldhauser@math.ethz.ch

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Current

I am a university researcher, a member of the Global Young Academy and a European citizen by conviction. Born and raised in Germany, mathematics brought me to live in and work in 7 countries in Europe, notably at the Faculty of Engineering of Lund University, the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Sheffield, the Chebychev Laboratory of St. Petersburg State University as postdoc of Stanislav Smirnov, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and University of Pisa, Stochastic Analysis group.

I also have a degree in Protestant Theology, with a focus on ethics of technology. During my time at the Munich Centre for Machine Learning, I combined both worlds through cross-disciplinary work in Digital Theology and AI ethics. My main projects included leveraging Machine Learning techniques for digital editions of biblical manuscripts, and algorithmizability of ethics.

In 2024, I was appointed topic expert, contributing in the background to the invaluable work of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board.

Research Outline

I am both a fundamental scientist and an ethics scholar, with relevant domain expertise in mathematics, artificial intelligence, climate modelling and ethics of technology. I investigate machine learning algorithms, evaluate their reliability and explainability, and draw attention to the ethical implications of our usage of this technology. I do fundamental research on large-scale geophysical flows and created a model to monitor CO2 emissions on a regional scale, which is important for policy decisions. My mathematical models appear as key working mechanisms from epidemiology, neurophysiology, to material sciences.

Having studied philosophy and theology, I know a diverse set of methodologies from the humanities and social sciences, which I applied in the last two years in interdisciplinary research in digital humanities (applied on 2000 year old papyrical manuscripts), and social sciences (gender studies, social migration).

For more details, especially on my mathematical research, please see my Research page.

Apart from research...

...I do care a great deal about equal opportunities in academia. What I mean with this and why it is not (only) about women in maths you can read on my Unconscious bias 101 page. I engage in EWM and the SIG diversity of the DMV.

In 2020 I joined the volunteer faculty of the International Mathematics Master (IMM) contributing to capacity building in mathematics in developing countries. I currently serve in the background, as executive board member, to help finance and run the programme.

I am passionate about maths communication and occasionally talk at Science Slams. I conduct freelance projects with IMAGINARY and am an editor of the Snapshots of Modern Mathematics from Oberwolfach.

I volunteered for many years at Studies Without Borders, among other duties coordinating their scholarship programme for students from the Northern Caucasus Region. The programme has won the 2011's Rector's award for extraordinary achievement of a student organization. Read my reportage on Chechnya here.

Updates and Activities

On the right are some (infrequent) updates about my activities, both in maths and elsewhere. More can be found on my research page

. For more details and recent talks or conferences I attended, see Activities

Irregular updates

Currently this homepage is only sporadically updated. I try to maintain the research updates on my Research page, but I might be some months late with that. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested in my latest results.


Looking for my preprints?

You can find my preprints on the servers of Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory in Pisa and arxiv.org. Below are some selected updates on my general activities.


Dec 2022

FORMAS, the Swedish governmental research council for sustainable development, has approved our 3 year research project "Learning to recognise local sustainable development from space". Looking forward to the collaboration with Ola Hall, Markus Grillitsch and Alexandros Sopasakis!

Dec 2022

Filip Bar has started his position as postdoctoral researcher in my group. Welcome, Filip!

Sept 2022

Prof. Nadia Ansini has been awarded a Lise Meitner visiting professorship from LTH and will visit my group several times in the next years.

June 2021

My project "Stochastic Models of Turbulence" is funded by the Crafoord foundation.

April 2021

My project "Mathematical Models for Material Science" was accepted for funding.