Christopher Straub

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Fraunhofer IISB

AI-augmented Simulation

I am a Senior Scientist at the AI-augmented Simulation group at Fraunhofer IISB in Erlangen (Germany). I am leading the research activities on Scientific Machine Learning, focusing on

  • Physics-Informed Machine Learning and its industrial applications,
  • methodological improvements of Physics-Informed Neural Networks.

My work spans diverse industry-relevant applications, including semiconductor process simulations, lithography, battery modelling, and plastic deformation.

I have a background in mathematics, where I obtained my PhD in March 2024. My doctoral research was focused on the analysis of partial differential equations arising in galactic dynamics using mathematical and numerical methods.

Recent news:

Jul 19, 2026 I will be at WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026 to present our work on data-calibrated simulations of photoresist photoreactions via physics-informed neural operators.
Jun 15, 2026 I will be attending the PhysML Workshop 2026 to give a talk on our work on physics-informed fine-tuning of PDE foundation models.
May 12, 2026 Check out jNO, our open-source JAX library for Neural Operator and PDE Foundation Model training. [GitHub repository] [Paper] [Blog post]
Mar 10, 2026 Our paper Physics-informed fine-tuning of foundation models for partial differential equations has been accepted at the ICLR 2026 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Partial Differential Equations. Very excited about this new research direction driven by Vlad Medvedev and Leon Armbruster. [LinkedIn post] [Blog post]
Mar 03, 2026 I attended the German Crystal Growth Conference again to give talks about our works on physics-informed machine learning for coupled heat transport and AI-based wafer defect detection.