Christoph Lippert

Health Data Scientist Christoph Lippert recently joined the Faculty of Digital Engineering, a faculty jointly founded by the University of Potsdam and the Hasso-Plattner-Institute, as a Full Professor. As chair for Digital Health with an emphasis on Machine Learning, Lippert is exploring the theory of machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as novel applications in medicine and genomics. The focus is on advancing the capabilities to predict personal health risks and supporting the personalized prevention of health issues and diseases, by analyzing data from medical health records, imaging, and sequencing. Lippert has made important contributions to linear mixed models for confounder correction in genomic association studies. With FaST-LMM, he has developed the first algorithm that enabled robust correction for confounding from population structure and hidden relatedness in studies involving over 100,000 individuals. 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 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., a digital health venture founded by J. Craig Venter. In 2017 Lippert returned to Germany to head the research group "Statistical Genomics" at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine.