Max Welling

Max Welling (born 1968) is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, based in Amsterdam.

Welling received his PhD in physics with a thesis on quantum gravity under the supervision of Gerard 't Hooft (1998) at the Utrecht University. He has published in machine learning, computer vision, statistics and physics, and worked on variational autoencoders (VAEs) together with Durk Kingma.

In 2010 he shared with two authors an Koenderink Prize. In 2025 Welling was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.