people and institutes

At the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, scholars pursue research relating to basic issues and current developments in the areas of public international law, European Union law, and the constitutional and administrative law of individual states, together with numerous visiting scholars from all over the world. In its fields, our library is the largest in Europe and one of the most comprehensive in the world.

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich is committed to fundamental legal and economic research on processes of innovation and competition and their regulation. Our research focuses on the incentives, determinants and implications of innovation. With an outstanding international team of scholars and excellent scientific and administrative infrastructure, including our renowned library, we host academics from all over the world and actively promote young researchers. We inform and guide legal and economic discourse on an impartial basis. As an independent research institution, we provide evidence-based research results to academia, policymakers, the private sector as well as the general public.

The Center for Humans and Machines (CHM) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin conducts interdisciplinary science to understand, anticipate, and shape major disruptions from digital media and Artificial Intelligence to the way we think, learn, work, play, cooperate, and govern. Our goal is to understand how machines are shaping human society today and how they may continue to shape it in the future. The Center is comprised of an interdisciplinary, international, and diverse group of scholars and a science support team. The Center’s researchers are distributed approximately 50-50 between computational and behavioral scientists.

Armin von Bogdandy is director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg and Professor for Public Law at the University in Frankfurt/Main. He is specialized in the general features of Public Law, with a focus on its structural changes, be they theoretical, doctrinal, or practical.

Josef Drexl is director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and Honorary Professor at the University of Munich. His main research areas include International Competition Law as well as European Media and Information Law, in particular issues concerning data, consumer interests and public welfare.

Iyad Rahwan is director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Honorary Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin. His work lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Human Behaviour, with a focus on the future impact of digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and of Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Erik Tuchtfeld leads the research group. He studied law at Heidelberg University, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and the University of Glasgow. He is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. In his PhD, he investigates the normative order of the digital public space, in particular the effects of its private structure on human rights. His main research fields are platform regulation, the protection of freedom of expression and the right to privacy in the digital realm.

Anna Sophia Tiedeke studied law at the University of Hamburg and the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne I in Paris. She is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. In her PhD project she employs poststructuralist thinking as an analytical lens to examine dynamics in the institutional landscape of global internet governance. Her research offers insights into the intricacies of normative encounters in digital spaces and allows to trace reconfigurations of subject construction in contact zones between different normativities. Her main research areas are international law and international legal theory, law and technology studies as well as Global Governance research. In her work, she also draws on insights from political theory and philosophy as well as linguistic and literary studies.

Chaewon Yun is a computational social scientist with a background in natural language processing and political science. She studied at RWTH Aachen, Yonsei University and the University of Zurich. Before joining the Center for Humans and Machines as a predoctoral researcher, she worked as a software engineer developing a voice assistant for mobile devices. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from the social sciences, computer science and applied ethics to contextualise technological problems. Her current research focuses on the societal implications of large language models.

Germán Oscar Johannsen studied law at the Universidad Católica de Chile, and the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center in Munich. He is a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. In his PhD, he examines the legal implications of the use of pricing algorithms in digital markets, with a focus on the interplay between EU competition and consumer laws. By taking a resource egalitarian approach, his research provides a regulatory theory to justify the State intervention in contexts of private power concentration. As a research fellow, he has also developed lines of research on big data merger control, Internet regulation, and data governance to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.