“He was pounding his table, yelling at me so fiercely that I could see him spitting,” says Gabriel Lando, a computational physicist from Brazil and former researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden.
Over several months, Jan-Michael Rost, the director of finite systems at the institute, would berate Lando during meetings, sometimes calling him “autistic” and “f***ing useless,” Lando claims. He recounts incidents where Rost would bang the table and shout at him.
Lando, who joined the institute in 2020, describes these moments as “the worst in my life, taking me over a year to recover from them.”
Such experiences are not isolated.
Widespread Investigations into Toxic Work Environment
Deutsche Welle’s investigative unit, in collaboration with German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, has spent months examining cases of abusive behavior and toxic environments within Max Planck Institutes across Germany.
We interviewed over 30 researchers, most of whom are from Asia, the Americas, and other parts of Europe and were lured to Germany with promises of conducting world-class research. More than half reported experiencing or witnessing misconduct by senior scientific staff, mostly directors, with women and people of color being particularly affected.
Deutsche Welle and Der Spiegel also analyzed detailed reports sent to Max Planck Society’s complaint channels, communications between victims, the involved parties, and confidential documents verifying those accounts.
Our findings suggest a failure to hold the abusive staff members or their institutes accountable.
