source, but also the effect of interventions in a system, and by facilitating transfer of detected regularities to new situations. Schölkopf and co-workers addressed (and in certain settings solved) the problem of causal discovery for the two-variable setting and connected causality to Kolmogorov complexity. Around 2010, Schölkopf began to explore how to use causality for machine learning, exploiting assumptions of independence of mechanisms and invariance. His early work on causal learning was exposed to a wider machine learning audience during his Posner lecture at NeurIPS 2011, as well as in a keynote talk at ICML 2017. He assayed how to exploit underlying causal structures in order to make machine learning methods more robust with respect to distribution shifts and systematic errors, the latter leading to the discovery of a number of new exoplanets including K2-18b, which was subsequently found to contain water vapour in its atmosphere, a first for an exoplanet in the habitable zone. Education and employment Schölkopf studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy in Tübingen and London. He was supported by the Studienstiftung and won the Lionel Cooper Memorial Prize for the best M.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of London. He completed a Diplom in Physics, and then moved to Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked with Vladimir Vapnik, who became co-adviser of his PhD thesis at the TU Berlin (with Stefan Jähnichen). His thesis, defended in 1997, won the annual award of the German Informatics Association. In 2001, following positions in Berlin, Cambridge and New York, he founded the Department for Empirical Inference at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, which grew into a leading center for research in machine learning. In 2011, he became founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. With Alex Smola, Schölkopf co-founded the series of Machine Learning Summer Schools. He also co-founded a Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Programme and the Max Planck-ETH Center for Learning Systems. In 2016, he co-founded the Cyber Valley research consortium. He participated in the IEEE Global Initiative on "Ethically Aligned Design". Schölkopf is co-editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, a journal he helped found, being part of a mass resignation of the editorial board of Machine Learning (journal). He is among the world’s most cited computer scientists. Alumni of his lab include Ulrike von Luxburg, Carl Rasmussen, Matthias Hein, Arthur Gretton, Gunnar Rätsch, Matthias Bethge, Stefanie Jegelka, Jason Weston, Olivier Bousquet,