Prof. Dr. Elsa Andrea Kirchner

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Elsa Andrea Kirchner has been a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2021, where she heads the "Medical Technology Systems" department at the Faculty of Engineering. She also heads the "Intelligent Healthcare Systems" team at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen, where she worked for many years.

After her studies in biology, Elsa Andrea Kirchner laid the foundation of her interdisciplinary research in the areas of human-robot interaction, embedded brain reading, neurophysiological methods (especially EEG, EMG, and other physiological data as well as motion data), behavioral analysis in humans, learning in humans and in artificial agents, embedded AI, embodied AI, and hybrid AI with a research stay at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in Boston/USA supported by the “Familie Klee Award”.

Her PhD in computer science was recognized as one of the best of the year by the “Gesellschaft für Informatik” in 2014. She is the author of more than 100 publications in international journals and conferences and 9 book chapters. For research transfer, Elsa Andrea Kirchner is involved, among other things, as a founding member of the DLR space management network "Space2Health".

Furthermore, from 2018 to August 2022 she was a member of Germany’s Platform for Artificial Intelligence in Working Group 6 ‘Health Care, Medical Technology, Care’. In September 2022, she assumed co-leadership of Working Group 7 ‘Learning Robotics Systems’ within this network. In April 2023, she has been appointed to the "Council for Technological Sovereignty" of the BMBF.