Max Welz

Welcome to my website! I am a postdoc in statistics at University of Zurich in the group of Carolin Strobl. In October 2025, I will be visiting the statistics department at London School of Economics, upon invitation by Irini Moustaki.

I received my PhD from the Econometric Institute at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2025, where I was blessed to be supervised by Patrick Groenen and Andreas Alfons. In fall 2023, I was visiting Massachusetts Institute of Technology upon invitation by Victor Chernozhukov and Mert Demirer. I am also affiliated with the Department of Public Health at Erasmus Medical Center (MC).

My research is motivated by practical problems in empirical research in the health and social sciences, for which I develop new statistical methods, derive their theoretical properties, and package them in user-friendly open-source software.

My current research interests are centered around robustness in the analysis of categorical data, which was the topic of my PhD thesis. For instance, the methods developed by me and my coauthors can be used to identify and account for careless responding in questionnaires. Details can be found on my research page.

I am a proud member of the Open Science Community Rotterdam, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Association for Statistical Computing, and the Psychometric Society.

If you want to get in touch, feel free to email me at max.welz@SPAM0.ch, m.welz@SPAM1.nl, or welz@SPAM2.edu, but you need to replace SPAM0, SPAM1, and SPAM2 with uzh, erasmusmc, and mit, respectively.