Paula Harder

Pronouns: She/Her

Brief Academic Bio

I am a researcher at the Mila Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, Canada, where I work with David Rolnick. I am also finishing my PhD in Machine Learning and Computer Science at Fraunhofer ITWM and the University of Kaiserslautern. My doctoral research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Oxford, focuses on deep learning for accelerating climate modeling, supervised by Janis Keuper, Nicolas Gauger, and Philip Stier.

Throughout my PhD, I have had the opportunity to intern at NASA/ESA Frontier Development Lab (FDL), Mila, and the Allen Institute for AI. Before my PhD, I worked as a developer and data scientist in the automotive industry after earning a master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Tübingen, where I specialized in numerical analysis under the supervision of Christian Lubich.

Current Projects

My current work focuses on deep learning applications for meteorological downscaling. This includes building a benchmark dataset for downscaling, evaluating and improving the generalization capabilities of existing models, and enhancing their ability to represent extreme events.

Broader Research Interests

I am passionate about advancing machine learning to address important challenges in environmental, climate, and weather modeling. My research focuses on issues such as ensuring physical consistency, improving generalization under distribution shifts, and better capturing extreme events in data.

Contact

paula.harder at mila.quebec · Twitter