Group members
Current members
- Steven Abreu, PhD student
- Herbert Jaeger, head of group
- Fabian IJpelaar, PhD student
- Guillaume Pourcel, PhD student
The MINDS group at the University of Groningen has been freshly re-founded since Herbert Jaeger moved from Jacobs University Bremen to Groningen in Fall 2019. After Jaeger’s retirement in June 2025, the above PhD projects continue until completion. Otherwise, the group will no longer operate as a group, but this webpage will evolve into the more or less personal webpage of Herbert Jaeger.
Alumni
- Celestine P. Lawrence, AI consultant
- Dirk Doorakkers, since 2021 PhD student at the University of Amsterdam
- Xu Owen He, since 2020 research scientist at Google DeepMind, since December 2024 Co-Founder and CTO of MakerMaker.AI, Montreal
- Fatemeh Hadaeghi, now postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Computational Neuroscience in the Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf
- Tianlin Liu, now research scientist at Google DeepMind Paris
- Michael Thon, PhD completed Jan 2018, now with Hyundai MOBIS in Frankfurt
- Dzmitry Bahdanau, now a research scientist at Element AI (Montreal) and Adjunct Professor at McGill University
- Dr. Stéphane Beauregard, now an independent navigation systems consultant, Los Gatos, California
- Dr. Mathias Bode, now distinguished lecturer at Constructor University Bremen (formerly Jacobs University)
- Dr. Mathieu Galtier, now head of department at medical AI startup Rythm
- Paul R. Gemin, Now Senior Staff Engineer at GE Aviation, Cincinnati, with many patents
- Dr. Manjunath Gandhi, now Associate Professor in Mathematics (Dynamical Systems) at the University of Pretoria
- Jordan Ivanchev, now Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at intobyte in Singapore
- Dr. Jiwen Li, now analyst at Get Capital AG
- Dr. Mantas Lukoševičius, now associate professor in machine learning at Kaunas University of Technology. He wrote much-used tutorial ESN code (in Python, Matlab, and R - your choice) while he was a MINDS member.
- Marta Müller, EU project administrator
- Vytenis Šakėnas
- Aparna Suchindranath
- Dr. Mingjie Zhao (now at a university in Hangzhou, China)
Some sparkling ones who did their theses in MINDS
- Dumitru Erhan (BSc 2004), now senior researcher at Google, Mountain View, 205000 Google Scholar cites (as of 2026)
- Benjamin Liebald (BSc 2004), then Leading SW Engineer at Google / YouTube, now co-founder of Mensch Labs
- Gediminas Luksys (BSc 2004), now lecturer at the University of Edinburgh
- Andreas Kolling (MSc 2006), now lecturer at the University of Sheffield
- Bartlomiej Grychtol (BSc 2007), now Humboldt Research Fellow at Fraunhofer IPA
- Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil (MSc 2007), now associate professor at Cornell Univ.
- Razvan Pascanu (MSc 2009), now researcher at Google DeepMind - 86000 Google Scholar citations (as of 2026)
- Anca Dragan (BSc 2009), now associate professor at UC Berkeley with 41000 Google Scholar citations (as of 2026)
- Josip Djolonga (BSc 2011), now research engineer in the Google Brain team in Zurich
- Dzmitry Bahdanau (MSc 2016), now research scientist at Element AI that has just been acquired by ServiceNow; also a Core Industry Member of Mila and Adjunct Professor at McGill University 119000 Google Scholar citations (as of 2026)