There was rarely a meeting with the director that didn’t feel destabilizing.
“He was hitting his table, yelling at me to the point that I could see him spitting,” says Gabriel Lando, a theoretical computational physicist from and a former postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in .
For months, Jan-Michael Rost, the institute’s director of finite systems, berated the young postdoc, calling him “autistic” and “f***ing useless,” Lando says. He describes meetings in which Rost repeatedly banged on the table, shouting at him.
“I think those were the worst moments of my life,” says Lando, who arrived at the institute in 2020. “It took me more than a year to heal from it, to stop dreaming about it.”
Lando’s experience is far from unique.
Sweeping investigation
For months, DW’s investigative unit, along with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, has probed cases of abusive behavior and toxic environments at Max Planck institutes across Germany.
We interviewed more than 30 scientists, most of them lured to Germany from Asia, the Americas and other parts of Europe with the promise of conducting world-class research.
More than half of them describe experiencing or witnessing misconduct perpetrated by senior scientific staff, often directors, but also group leaders, with women and people of color most at risk of abuse.
DW and Der Spiegel also reviewed detailed reports submitted to the Max Planck Society’s complaint mechanisms, communications between victims and staff involved in reporting processes, and confidential documents that corroborated the accounts.
Our findings suggest a systemic failure to hold abusive staff members or their institutes accountable.
Bullying, sexism common
The Max Planck Society often builds its institutes around gifted scientists, who are free to organize their research and facilities as they please, handpicking researchers while guiding scientific breakthroughs.
Its model is rooted in a revolutionary principle developed by Adolf von Harnack, a theologian and patron of the natural sciences, who in 1911 led the precursor to the Max Planck Society.
Harnack believed that research could best be advanced through institutes centered on single scientists, who would then pursue their breakthroughs unrestrained.
The model has been successful — the Max Planck Society counts 31 awarded to its scientists. Though Harnack’s idea has allowed research to flourish, it also offers power with little oversight, which at times has left junior scientists, such as PhDs and postdocs, at the mercy of their directors.
In 2019, a survey commissioned by the society found that nearly one in five respondents had experienced bullying at the institutes. It also found that non-German employees were significantly more at risk of being bullied or made the subjects of sexist remarks.
As a result of the survey, the Max Planck Society enacted several measures aimed at creating a more equitable working environment and improving accountability across its institutes, including producing a Code of Conduct. Yet cases of abuse persist — with women and people of color still especially on the receiving end.
Aubrey, a scientist who came to Germany to conduct her PhD at a Max Planck institute in the east, says an underlying atmosphere of had become the norm in her research group. Like many of the researchers we interviewed, she asked that her real name not be used because she fears reprisal.
“I would be excluded from discussions about my project,” Aubrey says.
She says she often feared her work wouldn’t be credited fairly — she had seen it happen to other women. DW corroborated her story and found similar cases throughout this investigation.
“Sometimes others would claim my work for theirs, and I just found that this type of behavior of overstating your own contributions and minimizing the contributions of others was just common practice,” Aubrey says. “That was how people survived.”
The institute declined to comment on individual cases without further details, adding that: “Management has not received any report” regarding sexist behavior perpetrated by a director or group leader in the past five years.
DW and Der Spiegel found cases of abusive behavior in other Max Planck institutes.
We spoke to 20 people who worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, most of whom say they either experienced, witnessed or were aware of misconduct perpetrated by Rost. DW and Der Spiegel also spoke to witnesses and reviewed communications that aligned with these accounts.
Elias, who came to Germany to work as a PhD researcher at the institute and asked that his real name not be used, says Rost instrumentalized contract renewals, particularly toward the end of contracts, threatening to withhold extensions if scientists didn’t do as he asked.
“He had leverage over those of us from outside Europe,” Elias says. “We needed the contract for our residency. He was abusing his power, threatening people to not extend their contract.”
We confronted Rost with the allegations, and the Max Planck Society replied on his behalf, saying: “Mr. Rost cannot confirm that he made the statements” reported by Lando. The society refused to comment on anonymous allegations.
‘Zero interest’ in investigations
Many of the young scientists we spoke with say they did not report misconduct for fear of the consequences. Some say they were unaware that reporting misconduct was even a possibility.
Scientists who did try to report all describe efforts to dissuade them from doing so. Several say they were warned that it would harm their careers; others were given the choice to accept the conditions at their institutes or leave.
Lando is one of them. He attempted to report Rost’s behavior and even reached out to the Max Planck Society’s lawyers of trust — an external law firm retained by the society and an official avenue for reporting misconduct. However, when he asked for anonymity, he received a conflicting reply.
“First of all let me tell that (sic) the whole process is confidential and anonymous as long as you don’t instruct me otherwise,” the email reads. “But to be honest, at one point, persons involved in the conflict have to be named in one way or another to enable investigations.”
Others say they faced more overt efforts to suppress their reporting. Felix, a former PhD researcher at a Max Planck institute in southern Germany, who also asked that his real name not be used, says he submitted a detailed report in 2022 to the Staff Unit for Internal Investigations, a body created as a result of the 2019 survey and tasked with assessing accounts and conducting preliminary investigations.
In an email exchange reviewed by DW and Der Spiegel, Felix was eventually told that his report would be forwarded to the managing director of his institute.
Doing that would have allowed a party with apparent conflicts of interest access to sensitive information, including the names of victims and details of the misconduct.
When Felix asked the Staff Unit not to forward the report in its current form, he was told that the complaint process was formally ended as a result of his request.
“I felt there is zero interest in actually doing any investigation,” Felix says. “I don’t want to accept that people are treated like this and that in the future young scientists have to run into a similar situation like I did.”
The Max Planck Society said it could not comment on the specifics of the two cases but said: “We grant the reporting person anonymity and confidentiality.”
Other junior scientists who approached the Staff Unit say many of their questions regarding the reporting process were not addressed and they felt discouraged from continuing the process.
DW and Der Spiegel approached the Max Planck Society, requesting data on how many reports of misconduct had been submitted to its Staff Unit for Internal Investigations and, of those, how many resulted in investigations or ended in disciplinary action.
The Max Planck Society denied the request, saying that data is not public.
The society also told us in an email that “anonymity … does not preclude a report from being checked for validity. Great importance is attached to the confidential treatment of the identity of reporting persons, also in further proceedings.”
Damaging implications
The Max Planck Society lacks effective supervisory structures, according to a report published by Germany’s Federal Court of Audit in 2024.
The report criticizes the society, which receives more than €2 billion ($2.1 billion) annually in public funds, saying it “does not have a proper supervisory body” and that “in fact, the president supervises his own actions.”
Thomas Sattelberger, a former lawmaker and parliamentary state secretary with Germany’s Education and Research Ministry, worked to change the issue through official inquiries during his time in .
“They need public supervisory bodies,” Sattelberger says. “And these supervisory bodies must also be liable for misconduct, as is common in many other areas of society.”
Sattelberger fears that, without a holistic solution that brings together oversight and accountability, the consequences could be dire for Germany.
“In our country, the standard of science is being increasingly compromised by these scandals,” Sattelberger says, “and we already have a major problem with top scientists leaving the country.”
Lando is one of them — he left Germany in 2021 after declining a contract extension at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. He now pursues his research into quantum chaos at one of South Korea’s leading scientific institutes.
“Nowadays, with more experience, I have worked with people who do science aggressively, and I don’t dislike it,” Lando says. “I think that an aggressive environment where people are fighting for their ideas, it can actually be quite productive.”
But that was not the case with his former Max Planck supervisor, he says.
“He was not fighting the science,” Lando says. “He was fighting the person. He was humiliating me.”
Edited by: Carolyn Thompson and Milan Gagnon.
Fact checking by: Julett Pineda.
The post How Germany’s Max Planck Society fails young scientists appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
