Francesco Locatello

Francesco Locatello is an assistant professor at ISTA leading the Causal Learning and Artificial Intelligence lab.

I'm hiring Ph.D. students and Postdocs

• Prospective Interns: I am not actively hiring interns outside of the ISTernship program: https://phd.pages.ist.ac.at/isternship/. Due to the volume, I unfortunately won't be able to reply to internship requests.

• Prospective Ph.D. students: please apply through https://phd.pages.ista.ac.at

• Prospective postdoctoral fellows: please get in touch with me via email! 

Short 3rd person bio

Francesco Locatello is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Before, he was a senior applied scientist at Amazon Web Services, leading the Causal Representation Learning team. He received his PhD from ETH Zürich in the Max Planck-ETH Center for Learning Systems. His research received several awards, including the ICML 2019 Best Paper award, the Hector Foundation award for outstanding achievements in machine learning from the Heidelberg Academy of Science in 2023, the Google Research Scholar Award in 2024. He was also an AI resident at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Lab Members

• Dingling Yao, ISTA, ELLIS student co-advised with Georg Martius

• Berker Demirel, ISTA

• Marek Jankola, ISTA, co-advised with Marco Mondelli

• Yiwen Qiu, ISTA, ELLIS co-advised with Bernhard Schölkopf

• Jan-Philipp von Bassewitz, ISTA

• Riccardo Cadei, ISTA, ELLIS student co-advised with Cordelia Schmid

• Walter Nelson, ISTA, ELLIS student co-advised with Arthur Gretton

• Dario Rancati, ISTA, ELLIS student co-advised with Max Welling

• Adeel Pervez, PostDoc at ISTA

• Francesco Montagna, PostDoc at ISTA

• Siddhartha Gairola, MPI and ELLIS, co-advised with Bernt Schiele

• Valentino Maiorca, PostDoc at ISTA 

Alumni (ISTA):

• Shimeng Huang, PostDoc at ISTA co-advised with Matt Robinson, now Eriksholm Research Center

• Marco Fumero, PostDoc at ISTA, now at Harvard

• Clémentine Dominé, PostDoc at ISTA co-advised with Marco Mondelli, now at Harvard 

Alumni (ELLIS):

• Luca Moschella, La Sapienza University and ELLIS, co-advised with Emanuele Rodolà. Now Apple

• Antonio Norelli, La Sapienza University and ELLIS, co-advised with Emanuele Rodolà. After: Oxford -> MIT

• Zhenyu Zhu, EPFL and ELLIS, co-advised with Volkan Cevher

• Francesco Montagna, University of Genoa and ELLIS, co-advised with Lorenzo Rosasco and Nicoletta Noceti

• Valentino Maiorca, La Sapienza University and ELLIS, co-advised with Emanuele Rodolà. Now PostDoc at ISTA