Hasso-Plattner-Institut
HPI Digital Health Cluster
 

30.08.2018

Press release

Data scientist Christoph Lippert is joining the Digital Engineering Faculty of Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam

Health data scientist Christoph Lippert, who until recently headed the “Statistical Genomics” research group at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, will take up a new position on September 1st at the Faculty of Digital Engineering, a faculty jointly founded by the University of Potsdam (UP) and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI).

As an expert for digital health with an emphasis on machine learning, Lippert’s work will explore the theory of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as novel applications in medicine. The focus is on advancing the capabilities to predict personal health risks and supporting the personalized prevention of health issues and diseases.

“We are very pleased to welcome Christoph Lippert to the University of Potsdam,” said University President Oliver Günther, PhD. “Our two new faculties, the Faculty of Digital Engineering and the Faculty of Health Sciences, enable the exploration of completely new directions at the interface between informatics and medicine. This means supporting strong synergies between both areas of specialization. Dr. Lippert perfectly embodies these synergies and cooperation potential,” Günther said.

“Machine learning and artificial intelligence offer exciting perspectives for the medicine of the future. Gaining the expertise of Christoph Lippert means that we will have a specialist who will advance the research and teaching at HPI in this important field,” said the Dean of the joint faculty at HPI and UP, Professor Christoph Meinel.

“Christoph Lippert will be a great asset to our faculty,” said Professor Erwin Böttinger, Head of the HPI Digital Health Center and Professor for Digital Health, whose research is focused on personalized medicine. “With his outstanding international recognition in health data science, Christoph Lippert will leverage the excellent environment at the HPI Digital Health Center to advance precision health and personalized medicine with cutting-edge human data science,” Böttinger added.

Lippert studied bioinformatics from 2001–2008 in Munich and went on to earn his doctorate at the Max Planck Institutes for Intelligent Systems and for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in the field of computational biology, with an emphasis on genome-associated studies. In 2012 he accepted a position in the US at Microsoft Research and subsequently carried out work at Human Longevity, Inc. In 2017 Lippert returned to Germany to head the research group “Statistical Genomics” at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine.