Professional and scientific career

Professor Daniel C. Baumgart, MD PhD MBA went to medical school in Berlin, Basel and Würzburg. He received his training in internal medicine, gastroenterology, hepatology and immunology at the Charite and as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and German Research Foundation (DFG) scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, MD, USA. He is a Guest Professor of Medicine at Charité Medical School of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, served as Deputy Chief of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Virchow Hospital and elected Fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) endowed by the StiftungCharite foundation until 2017 before becoming Head of the Department of Gastroenterology Hepatology, Infectious Diseases and Rheumatology at Ernst von Bergmann Hospital in 2023.

Since 2017 he has been appointed as Professor of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, where he directed the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology until 2022. He is principal investigator and program director of the „From Data to Decision (FD2D) – Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence from Data Value Chain to Human Value“ Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE). It unites a multidisciplinary group of researchers and innovators at 22 leading academic institutions and technology companies in North America, Europe and Asia, that develop and study digital transformation and artificial intelligence applications across various academic disciplines and industrial sectors as well as their impact on society, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (Mitacs) and the University of Alberta.

Visiting professor at the FGW

Prof. Dr. Daniel C. Baumgart is currently a visiting researcher at the FGW/ University of Potsdam. The faculty is about to prepare a joint appointment with the Klinikum Ernst von Bergmann at the University of Potsdam to establish a professorship for Digital Transformation in Medicine and Healthcare. Medicine and health care are confronted with an exponential increase in knowledge and diversity of information. The enormous amount of knowledge and experience can increasingly no longer be translated into therapeutic-, research- and health-economic success. Advancement of information and communication technology, computer science methodology and digital innovation can help accelerate, enhance and refine medical knowledge acquisition and translation to ultimately enable precision health.

The German government’s implementation strategy for shaping the digital transformation has defined digital competence, infrastructure and equipment, innovation and digital transformation as fields of action. In order to achieve the strategic goal of an in-depth digital integration of multidisciplinary science, medicine and healthcare to accomplish the digital transformation of the Berlin Brandenburg metropolitan region (Health Capital Cluster), the first, pivotal step is to integrate and transform clinical and scientific resources at state level in Brandenburg.

The professorship is to be understood as an intellectual and technical “incubator” in which ideas and concepts are created, structured and evaluated in order to ultimately implement them in Brandenburg and develop further national and international collaborations. Professor Baumgart’s extensive hands-on experience from the already highly digitized healthcare and university systems in the USA and Canada will be incorporated here. The professorship also represents the core structure for the foundation of a future Brandenburg Institute for Digital Integration and Transformation of Medicine (DIGIT-M) based at the University of Potsdam.

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