Effective September 1, 2026, Professor Vera Schmitt will assume the
W2 Professorship in Information Systems at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). She has held the position in an acting capacity since June 2026.

Professor Schmitt’s research addresses a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence: how to design AI systems whose decisions are explainable, robust, and reliable. She investigates this question both conceptually and through applied research in areas including clinical decision support and the detection of disinformation, deepfakes, and coordinated information manipulation. Her work integrates natural language processing with methods from explainable AI, advancing trustworthy and resilient information processing.

She is the founder and director of the XplaiNLP research group, which conducts interdisciplinary
research on the explainability and robustness of language models. As a principal investigator, she
has secured approximately €6 million in competitive external research funding and leads several
national and European research projects. Research appointments in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Copenhagen,
Toulouse, and Cambridge have contributed to an extensive international network of collaborators.

Before joining JGU, Vera Schmitt held a position at the Quality and Usability Lab at Technische
Universität Berlin and conducted research as a visiting scholar at the German Research Center for
Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). She earned her doctorate in natural sciences from TU Berlin, graduating
summa cum laude. She previously studied data science as well as political and administrative
sciences—an interdisciplinary background that continues to shape her methodological approach to
technical and societal questions.

In addition to publishing at top-tier international conferences and receiving multiple Best Paper
Awards, Professor Schmitt was named a Junior Fellow of the German Informatics Society
(Gesellschaft für Informatik) in recognition of her scholarly contributions. In 2025, the German
newspaper Der Tagesspiegel named her one of the “100 Most Important Figures in Berlin’s
Academic and Research Community.” She is regularly sought out by national and international media
for her expertise in artificial intelligence and disinformation