Bjoern Eskofier
Bjoern M. Eskofier (SM, IEEE) currently directs the Institute for AI in Medicine (I-AIM) at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). Until September 2025, he headed the Machine Learning and Data Analytics (MaD) Lab at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuernberg (FAU). Bjoern also served as founding spokesperson of FAU’s Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), spokesperson of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action GAIA-X usecase project “TEAM-X” and co-director of the German Research Foundation collaborative research center “EmpkinS” (www.empkins.de). Since April 2023, he is an associate principal investigator and leader of the research group “Translational Digital Health” at the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich.
Dr. Eskofier studied Electrical Engineering at the FAU and graduated in 2006. He then did his PhD in Biomechanics under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Benno Nigg at the University of Calgary (Canada). He authored more than 400 peer reviewed articles, holds 5 patents, started three spinoff startup companies, and is in a supporting role for further startups. He won several medical-technical research awards, including the “Curious Minds” award 2021 in “Life Sciences” by Manager Magazin and Merck and the “Unipreneurs” award 2023 from the German Minster of Education and Research and the German Minister for Economy.
Bjoern Eskofier has defined his research and entrepreneurial agenda to revolve around contributions to a “Digital Health Ecosystem”, where patients are connected to other stakeholders within the Healthcare system using digital support tools. His digital health research philosophy is that only multidisciplinary teams of engineers, medical experts, industry representatives and entrepreneurs will have the tools to actually implement changes in healthcare.