Bernt Schiele is Max-Planck-Director at MPI Informatics and Professor at Saarland University since 2010.

He studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He worked on his master thesis in the field of robotics in Grenoble, France, where he also obtained the "diplome d'etudes approfondies d'informatique". In 1994 he worked in the field of multi-modal human-computer interfaces at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA in the group of Alex Waibel. In 1997 he obtained his PhD from INP Grenoble, France under the supervision of Prof. James L. Crowley in the field of computer vision. The title of his thesis was "Object Recognition using Multidimensional Receptive Field Histograms". Between 1997 and 2000 he was postdoctoral associate and Visiting Assistant Professor with the group of Prof. Alex Pentland at the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. From 1999 until 2004 he was Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technoly in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Between 2004 and 2010 he was Full Professor at the computer science department of TU Darmstadt.