He obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in 2008, which earned him an honorable mention for the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award. Later he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research Search Labs in Silicon Valley (in the group of Rakesh Agrawal) and in the WebDam team at INRIA Saclay/France (in the group of Serge Abiteboul), and led an independent Otto Hahn Research Group, funded by the Max Planck Society. Fabian is the main architect of the YAGO ontology, one of the largest public knowledge bases.