Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Also known as Carola Schönlieb
Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where she heads the Cambridge Image Analysis group. Her research combines variational methods, partial differential equations and machine learning for image analysis and inverse imaging problems. She earned a master's degree in mathematics at Salzburg in 2004 and a PhD at Cambridge in 2009 on image inpainting. Her Cambridge career moved from lecturer in 2010 to professor in 2018. A paper she co-authored on a tuning-free plug-and-play algorithm won an ICML 2020 Outstanding Paper award.
Timeline
-
2004–2009
A Cambridge PhD on image inpainting
She earns a master's degree in mathematics at Salzburg in 2004 and works as a research assistant at the University of Vienna from 2005 to 2008. She completes a Cambridge PhD in 2009 on PDE techniques for image inpainting.
-
2010–2018
Rising to professor at Cambridge
After postdoctoral work at Göttingen, she joins Cambridge as a lecturer in 2010. She is promoted to reader in 2015 and to professor in 2018.
-
2016
A Whitehead Prize
She wins the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2016 for her contributions to the mathematics of image analysis.
-
2017–2020
Leverhulme, Calderón and Wolfson honours
The Philip Leverhulme Prize arrives in 2017, followed by the Calderón Prize in 2019 and a Royal Society Wolfson Fellowship in 2020.
-
2020
An ICML outstanding paper
She co-authors a tuning-free plug-and-play algorithm for inverse imaging problems, which wins an ICML 2020 Outstanding Paper award. Its policy network, learned through model-free and model-based deep reinforcement learning, sets the internal parameters automatically.
-
2021
Visiting scientist at Simons Institute
She joins the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing as a visiting scientist in fall 2021, for the program Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling.
-
2022
An honorary doctorate from Klagenfurt
The University of Klagenfurt grants her an honorary doctorate in 2022.
-
As of October 2026
Heading the Cambridge Image Analysis group
She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and heads the Cambridge Image Analysis group. She directs the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information and chairs the SIAM activity group on Imaging Sciences. Her research covers variational methods, partial differential equations and machine learning for image analysis and inverse imaging problems.
Sources and credits
Photo: Petra Lein, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
