Christopher Morris

Full professor & DFG Emmy Noether fellow

I lead the Learning on Graphs (LoG) group at RWTH Aachen University. We develop machine learning methods for (graph-)structured data.

From 2022 to 2025, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at RWTH. Before joining RWTH, I was a postdoc at the Mila – Quebec AI Institute and McGill University in the group of Siamak Ravanbakhsh, and at Polytechnique Montréal in the group of Andrea Lodi. Before Montréal, I was a PhD student at TU Dortmund University, advised by Petra Mutzel and Kristian Kersting.

In Aachen, I supervise five great PhD students: Chendi Qian, Antoine Siraudin, Antonis Vasileiou, Timo Stoll, and Solveig Wittig.

Currently, we do not accept interns.

Research

Our research brings together machine learning, theoretical computer science, and discrete mathematics. We focus on three questions:

  1. How do we effectively capture (graph-)structured data in a data-driven manner?
  2. How can we ensure such methods generalize to unseen data?
  3. How can such methods improve discrete algorithms in a data-driven manner?

Selected publications (All)

  1. 2026

    Which Algorithms Can Graph Neural Networks Learn?

    Solveig Wittig, Antonis Vasileiou, Robert R. Nerem, Timo Stoll, Floris Geerts, Yusu Wang, Christopher Morris

    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

  2. 2025

    Covered Forest: Fine-grained generalization analysis of graph neural networks

    Antonis Vasileiou, Ben Finkelshtein, Floris Geerts, Ron Levie, Christopher Morris

    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

  3. 2024

    Exploring the Power of Graph Neural Networks in Solving Linear Optimization Problems

    Chendi Qian, Didier Chételat, Christopher Morris

    International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)

  4. 2023

    Fine-grained Expressivity of Graph Neural Networks

    Jan Böker, Ron Levie, Ningyuan Huang, Soledad Villar, Christopher Morris

    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

  5. 2023

    Combinatorial optimization and reasoning with graph neural networks

    Quentin Cappart, Didier Chételat, Elias B. Khalil, Andrea Lodi, Christopher Morris, Petar Velickovic

    Journal of Machine Learning Research

  6. 2023

    WL meet VC

    Christopher Morris, Floris Geerts, Jan Tönshoff, Martin Grohe

    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

  7. 2020

    Weisfeiler and Leman go sparse: Towards scalable higher-order graph embeddings

    Christopher Morris, Gaurav Rattan, Petra Mutzel

    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Teaching

Winter 2026/27

Summer 2026

Winter 2025/26

Summer 2025

Winter 2024/25

Summer 2024

  • Class · Bachelor & MasterFoundations and Applications of Machine Learning with Graphs

Summer 2023