Christian Igel is a professor at DIKU, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen. He studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Dortmund and received his doctoral degree in 2002 from the Faculty of Technology at Bielefeld University.

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In 2010, he obtained his habilitation from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Sciences at Ruhr-University Bochum. From 2003 to 2010, he was Junior Professor for Optimization of Adaptive Systems at the Institute for Neuroinformatics at Ruhr-University Bochum. In October 2010, he joined DIKU as Professor with special duties in Machine Learning, and since December 2014, he has been a Full Professor there. He is the Director of the SCIENCE AI Centre at the University of Copenhagen and Co-Director of the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Denmark. Christian is a Fellow of ELLIS (the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) and a member of the ELLIS Unit Copenhagen. His main research area is Machine Learning. Currently, he is particularly interested in support vector machines and other kernel-based methods, evolution strategies for single- and multi-objective optimization as well as reinforcement learning, PAC-Bayesian analysis of ensemble methods, deep and stochastic neural networks, and applications of machine learning that contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

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He serves as an advisory board member of the German Journal on Artificial Intelligence (KI) and as an Associate Editor of the Evolutionary Computation Journal (ECJ).

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