Markus is Deputy Director (Research) at the Monash AI Institute. Through its interdisciplinary community of world-leading researchers and vast affiliate network, the institute advances the frontiers of artificial intelligence through cutting-edge research, industry collaboration, training and entrepreneurship.

Markus is an Associate Professor at the Department of Data Science and AI, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. He has conducted his PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany and at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His research topics range from mathematical runtime analysis of heuristic optimisation algorithms and theory-guided algorithm design to applications of heuristic methods to software engineering and renewable energy production. While his research is fundamental at times, he is no stranger to industry-funded research; some of his translational projects are funded by Google, Facebook, and by several companies in defence, mining, sports, and energy.

Markus has been deeply passionate about sustainability since his high-school days… and still is. He served as the first ever Sustainability Officer at the ACM Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and now is the SIG's Treasurer; he founded the IEEE CIS Task Force on Computational Intelligence in the Energy Domain, and he is Senior Advisor to the Monash Energy Institute.

Using further, “raw” academic performance indicators: Markus has written about 200 articles with about 250 co-authors, his h-index is over 40 (over 5k citations), and he has attracted over AUD 14M in funding (AUD 3M as lead). To date, his results have been recognised with one best poster award, one best presentation award, four best paper awards, one medal, one HUMIES Gold Award, and the 2024 Biannual German IT Security Award. He served as General Chair of the 1000-attendee GECCO’22, he founded the IEEE CIS Task Force on Benchmarking and the IEEE CIS Task Force on Benchmarking, and he is co-founder of the area of Data-Driven Search-Based Software Engineering (2017/2018).

Markus has all his papers available on his website: https://www.acrocon.com/~wagner/