Maximilian did not return from a mountain tour in October 2023 and has been missing ever since.
Maximilian Weigert studied Statistics at LMU from 2011 to 2017 and graduated with an overall grade of “excellent.” In 2017, he also received the institute’s award for best consulting project for his work titled “Forecasting cinema attendance based on Google search behavior.” During his time as a student, he worked at our institute as a student assistant from 2015 to 2017, where he already stood out for his outstanding teaching skills in tutorial sessions.
In autumn 2018, we were able to recruit him as a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Statistical Consulting Lab. His position was also funded through projects of the Munich Center of Machine Learning.
Through his dedicated teaching over the past five years, he is remembered by many students as a committed and highly competent instructor and mentor in exercises, seminars, and tutorials. He played a key role for years in supporting core courses on statistical modeling and was an essential pillar of teaching operations at our institute. He also designed and supervised interdisciplinary seminars, including collaborations with the geosciences.
In statistical consulting—a task he always approached with enthusiasm and commitment—he provided important input in numerous projects, which is reflected in at least three scientific publications.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the COVID-19 Data Analysis Group (CODAG) was founded at the institute. Maximilian Weigert was involved from the very beginning and contributed with great dedication. To provide the public with relevant information, fast and precise analyses were required—often carried out during many voluntary overtime hours, including weekends. The development of widely recognized methods for nowcasting hospitalization data of COVID-19 patients was both of high practical relevance and methodological importance. In this context, he played a leading role for the Statistical Consulting Lab in the so-called Nowcast Hub of the University of Karlsruhe.
He also contributed to many CODAG reports and was involved in key publications of the CODAG group. Furthermore, he played a leading role in an important analysis of the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination. The corresponding publication—on which he was first author—appeared in the German Medical Journal. Another publication he contributed to was published on November 17, 2023, also in the German Medical Journal (“Long-term changes in protection against severe COVID-19 outcomes. A retrospective observational study among older individuals during the Omicron wave”).
In addition, he was involved in the analysis of the Munich cohort study (KoCoImpf), focusing in particular on risk analyses and immune responses among healthcare workers.
Alongside his numerous analyses, Maximilian Weigert contributed to two major research projects. On the one hand, he participated in climate change analyses in collaboration with the Institute of Geography, focusing on the classification of weather patterns using modern machine learning methods. His involvement in two publications highlights his outstanding methodological work at the interface of statistics and machine learning. On the other hand, he was involved in the DFG-funded project TourIST (“Tourism In Space and Time”), making a decisive contribution to its success. In collaboration with the Chair of Geography (Prof. Schmude), extensive data on tourism behavior in Germany over the past 50 years were successfully analyzed.
Maximilian Weigert was also well connected internationally. A particularly interesting collaboration was with the University of Bilbao, where data on injury risks among football players were analyzed.
The above overview demonstrates the outstanding and diverse research activities of Maximilian Weigert. The completion of his doctoral dissertation had been planned for the end of this year. For a cumulative dissertation (i.e., a thesis consisting of scientific publications), he had already produced significantly more publications than required.
The colleagues and staff of the Institute of Statistics at LMU deeply miss Max as a competent and dedicated researcher and teacher. He was always a friendly, cooperative, and personable colleague. We are very saddened that he is no longer enriching our institute.
Maximilian Weigert