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Digital Health Researcher Ariel D. Stern Moves from Harvard to the University of Potsdam with Humboldt Professorship

Prof. Dr. Ariel D. Stern
Photo : HPI / Kay Herschelmann
Prof. Dr. Ariel D. Stern

Digital health expert Ariel D. Stern, currently a professor at Harvard Business School, has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship and will thus conduct research and teach at the University of Potsdam. The professorship, endowed with 3.5 million euros, is awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Ariel D. Stern is world-renowned as a researcher at the intersection of medicine, economics, health policy, statistics and health care management, and she will take over the Digital Health Chair as a Humboldt Professor at the Digital Engineering Faculty. She will bridge a gap between sound theory and application-oriented research and strengthen the faculty in the field of Digital Health through interdisciplinary networking, technology transfer, and its international integration.

"With Ariel D. Stern, we have gained one of the few world-class experts in health systems research for the University of Potsdam," says University President Prof. Oliver Günther, Ph.D. "We want to establish this exciting, promising field of research in Germany with her, and further raise the profile of the research conducted by the Digital Engineering Faculty, which is jointly supported with the Hasso Plattner Institute. Quite incidentally, this extraordinary appointment also demonstrates the performance of our Digital Engineering Faculty, which was founded in 2016 and remains a unique institution worldwide."

Stern works on a wide range of digital health issues and opens up innovative new fields of research by applying methods from statistics, data science, and econometrics to areas where little research has been done before. In addition, she successfully transfers scientific know-how into practice: Experienced in policy consulting, she develops policy position papers and leads the social dialogue on how, for example, AI methods can be transferred to the health care sector.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Friedrich, HPI Managing Director and Dean of the joint Digital Engineering Faculty of the University of Potsdam and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), said, "We are delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Ariel Dora Stern and congratulate her warmly on her Humboldt Professorship. With her support, we at HPI will further strengthen our research on digitalization in healthcare - and do so with international appeal. Start-ups developing new services for the healthcare sector on the HPI campus will also benefit from this extensive expertise."

After studying economics, Ariel Dora Stern received her doctorate from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2014, where she was first Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Harvard Business School from 2019. She has already worked in Potsdam as a Visiting Scholar at the Hasso Plattner Institute in 2021/22. In 2020, she was a finalist for the Health Care Research Award of the American National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. She is a member of societies of international, American and German health economists and for Digital Medicine.
The award ceremony will take place in May 2024.

Contact: Dr. Silke Engel, University Spokesperson
Telephone: 0331 977-1474
Email: presseuni-potsdamde

Photo: Prof. Dr. Ariel D. Stern. Photo: HPI / Kay Herschelmann.

Media Information 06-06-2023 / No. 058