Guinevere Kauffmann

In February 2018, the German news magazine Spiegel Online published an article about abuse of power by senior scientists at the MPI for Astrophysics. Several emails obtained by BuzzFeed News Germany revealed in June 2018 that the allegations concerned MPA director Guinevere Kauffmann, who was accused of harassing and bullying students and scientists for years. Leaked emails published by BuzzFeed News Germany also include what has been described as racist, sexist and homophobic statements directed at employees and students. Responding to questions by the journal Nature, Kauffmann denied the accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia, claiming that she is merely interested in cultural differences between people and Buzzfeed had made severe errors. She conceded that as a student she was subject to "very high pressure supervision", acknowledging however that such a mentoring style "has now become unacceptable" and claiming to have changed her behavior substantially after complaints were received. This and other cases sparked a general debate about the abuse of power in science.

In August 2018, Science Magazine reported allegations of bullying and sexual harassment at the MPI for Astrophysics in Garching and reported that Kauffmann had been accused of bullying, was receiving coaching and daily monitoring, and had been given a drastically reduced group to lead. In an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the director of the MPI admitted that the scandal had shown deficiencies in and the need for improvement of the MPI's procedures for dealing with complaints.

She was a member of the Miller Research Fellows program at the University of California, Berkeley, and was then employed as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. She became head of a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in 2003. As of 2013, she is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

Kauffmann obtained a B.Sc.(Hons) in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in 1988 and an M.Sc. in astronomy in 1990. She obtained her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Cambridge in 1993, working with Simon White, whom she later married.