Felix Otto is director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
in Leipzig (Germany) since 2010. Before, he has been a professor at the University of
California at Santa Barbara and at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bonn where he was the Managing director of the ‘Hausdorff Center for Mathematics’ from 2006–2009.

His main expertise is in the applied analysis of partial differential equations and in the calculus of variations, lately also with randomness. He has worked on gradient flow structures of dissipative evolution equations, on pattern formation in ferromagnets, and on stochastic homogenization.

He has received the Max Planck Research Prize, the Leibniz prize of the German Science Foundation, and the Collatz price of CICIAM.

Presently, he is chair of the scientific committee at Oberwolfach Research Institute
for Mathematics (MFO). He was an ICM sectional speaker 2002 in Beijing, an ICIAM plenary speaker 2007 in Zurich, and ICM panel chair of the PDE section in 2018.