If you moved to Berlin for a PhD, a postdoc, or a research role and you don't (yet) speak German, this post is for you. The research community in Berlin is one of the densest in Europe, but most of the community listings, meetups, and mailing lists are in German. Here's a plain look at what's actually here and how to find peers in English.
Berlin's research scene is huge — but hard to break into in English
Berlin holds a strange contradiction for international researchers: enormous scale, thin English-language front door.
On paper, the city is packed. Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Max Planck and Leibniz institutes are scattered across the city. Then there are the four universities (FU, HU, TU, and Charité as a joint medical faculty), plus a growing set of applied-AI labs, biotech startups, and user-research teams inside Berlin's tech scene.
The problem isn't headcount. The problem is that most of the informal glue — Stammtische, faculty lunches, department Slack channels, the little posters in the kitchen — happens in German. If your working language is English, you can spend six months in the city and still not know who else is doing something close to your work.
That's the gap this post is about.
For international PhDs and postdocs who don't (yet) speak German
A lot of the researchers arriving in Berlin fall into one of a few buckets.
Many are early-career: a PhD student on a three-year contract at a Max Planck institute, or a postdoc who moved for a specific PI. Some are UX and product researchers hired by Berlin-based tech companies. Others are visiting scholars on shorter stays. What they share is that their lab, team, or institute is internally English-speaking, but the city around it isn't — or at least, doesn't advertise itself that way.
The usual advice — "just learn German" — is fine long-term. It doesn't help you in month two, when you want to talk to another qualitative researcher, or another computational neuroscientist, and you don't know where they are.
You also don't want another giant conference-style meetup where you exchange five business cards and nothing sticks. You want a small table, a real conversation, and maybe one or two people you'd genuinely email later.
Meeting peers across Charité, Max Planck, the universities and startups
Berlin's research community isn't one community. It's a loose federation, and the seams are where interesting conversations happen.
Someone doing wet-lab work at Charité and someone doing computational modelling at a Max Planck institute may never cross paths, even if their questions overlap. A UX researcher at a Berlin scaleup and a social scientist at HU may be studying the same behaviour from opposite angles. A postdoc at TU and a research engineer at a small AI lab in Kreuzberg might be one coffee away from a useful collaboration.
The cross-institution, cross-sector mix is the actual value of being in Berlin. It's also the part that no single lab or department can give you on its own.
A few things that tend to work, in our experience designing peer formats:
- Small groups (4–6 people) rather than large mixers. Everyone gets to talk.
- Mixed seniority and mixed field. Same-lab lunches are useful, but you already have those.
- A fixed cadence. One-off events don't build a network; monthly ones do.
- A shared working language. In Berlin, for internationals, that's English.
How RLC matches you into a monthly Berlin lunch
Research Lunch Club runs one thing: monthly small-group lunches for researchers, in the city they're in.
When you apply, you tell us a bit about your work — your field, your career stage, what you're curious about right now. Each month we match you into a group of 4–6 other researchers in Berlin and send you a time and place. The lunches are in English by default, so you don't have to think about it. You show up, eat, talk, and go back to your day.
We built RLC around a monthly cadence because one-off networking rarely leads anywhere. Seeing new faces every month, over a normal amount of time (a lunch, not an evening), tends to be how researchers actually build a working peer network in a new city. If you want the mechanics, how the lunches are matched walks through it, and the common questions about how it works covers the rest.
You can also see what's happening locally on the Berlin city page.
Berlin's research community in English exists. It's just spread across a lot of buildings. A monthly lunch is a small, low-pressure way to start meeting it. If you're a researcher in Berlin, the next round of lunches is open for sign-ups. Apply at /join.