Congratulations Dr Dax!

Congratulations to Max Dax, who defended his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in July 2025. Max will take up a position as Principal Investigator at the Ellis Institute in Tübingen in September, where he will lead research on probabilistic AI and scientific applications.

Max and I worked closely together over five years developing Dingo, our simulation-based inference framework for gravitational waves. His PhD research produced a remarkable series of results — from the first amortized neural posterior estimation for real gravitational-wave events (PRL, 2021), to neural importance sampling (PRL, 2023), to the extension to binary neutron stars published in Nature (2025). These methods are now being adopted within the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration.

It has been a privilege to be part of Max’s scientific development, and I look forward to continued collaboration as he builds his own group!