Wieland Brendel is a Hector-endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Emmy Noether Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Following his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the École normale supérieure in Paris, he established himself as a leading researcher in robust, generalizable, and interpretable machine vision, receiving the 2023 German Pattern Recognition Award for his substantial contributions to the field. He is a member of Capital Magazine's "Top-40-under-40 Elite Board" and has successfully bridged academia, society, and industry as co-founder of multiple ventures, including a nationwide AI school competition (BWKI), a visual quality control startup (Maddox AI), and most recently Polybot, which develops state-of-the-art dexterous robotics algorithms to unlock a sustainable future for humanity's food production.