Joachim M. Buhmann leads the group of “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning” in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He has been a full professor of Information Science and Engineering (Informatik) since October 2003.

Born in 1959 in Friedrichshafen, Germany, he studied Physics at the Technical University Munich and obtained his PhD in Theoretical Biophysics with Professor Klaus Schulten. His doctoral thesis was about pattern recognition in neural networks. He then spent three years as a research assistant and assistant professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He spent 1991 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He held the chair of practical Computer Science (praktische Informatik) at the University of Bonn, Germany from 1992 to 2003.

His research interests spans the areas of pattern recognition and data analysis, including machine learning, statistical learning theory and applied statistics. Application areas of his research include image analysis, remote sensing and bioinformatics. He has been in the technical committee of the German Pattern Recognition Society (Deutschen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Mustererkennung) since 1995, including serving on the board during 2000-2003. He is associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.