Carsten Eickhoff
Professor, Director
Office: Schaffhausenstraße 77, Office 1.35
[email protected]
0000-0001-9895-4061
carsteneickhoff
eickhoffI develop data-driven computational methods for improving individual health and quality of medical care. I lead the Health NLP Lab at the University of Tübingen, where we specialize in mining, representation, and retrieval of large-scale natural language resources. I am a member of the Cluster of Excellence "Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science". Check out their blog here.
Metrics
- Number of publications: 191
- Citations: 6,642 (Google Scholar)
- h-index: 36
- i10-index: 98
- Cumulative Journal Impact Factor: 415
Academic Career
| Year | Position | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 - now | Full Professor, Director | University of Tübingen, Germany |
| 2022 - now | Scientific Director, Medical Data Integration | Tübingen University Hospital, Germany |
| 2018 - 2022 | Manning Assistant Professor | Brown University, USA |
| 2017 | Visiting Researcher | Harvard University, USA |
| 2014 - 2017 | Postdoc | ETH Zurich, Switzerland |
Education
| Year | Degree Program | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 - 2014 | PhD (Computer Science), advisor: Arjen P. de Vries, subject: “Contextual Multidimensional Relevance Models” | TU Delft, The Netherlands |
| 2008 - 2009 | MS (Artificial Intelligence) | The University of Edinburgh, UK |
| 2005 - 2008 | BS (Computer Science) | FHDW Hannover, Germany |
Activities in the Research System
Teaching
| Semester | Class | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| Summer 2024 – present | Understanding Language Models | University of Tübingen |
| Winter 2023 – present | Introduction to Artificial Intelligence | University of Tübingen |
| Summer 2023 - present | Natural Language Processing | University of Tübingen |
| Summer 2023 - present | Modern Search Engines | University of Tübingen |
| Summer 2023 | AI in Medicine | University of Tübingen |
| Winter 2023 | Introduction to Artificial Intelligence | University of Tübingen |
| Spring 2019 - 2021 | Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine | Brown University |
| Spring 2016 - 2017 | Advanced Topics in IR & NLP | ETH Zürich |
| Fall 2016 | Machine Learning | ETH Zürich |
| Fall 2014 - 2016 | Research in Computer Science | ETH Zürich |
Advising
Junior Faculty (6)
Harrisen Scells (Assistant Professor at University of Tübingen), Kristof Meding (Assistant Professor at University of Tübingen), Taylor Burke (Assistant Professor at Harvard University), Adeel Abbasi(Assistant Professor at Brown University), Maya Vadiveloo (Associate Professor at the University of Rhode Island), Laura Mercurio (Assistant Professor at Brown University)
Postdoc (4)
Shrestha Ghosh (ongoing), Seyed Ali Bahrainian (ongoing), Augusto García-Agúndez (Postdoc at UCSF), Daniel Cohen (Research Scientist at DataMinr).
PhD (13)
Siran Li (ongoing), Gregory Polyakov (ongoing), Florian Rottach (ongoing), Michal Golovanevsky (ongoing), Catherine Chen (ongoing), Tasallah Abdullahi (ongoing), Ruochen Zhang (ongoing), William Rudman Jr. (PhD 2025, Postdoc at UT Austin), John Merullo (PhD 2025 Research Scientist at Goodfire), Georgios Zerveas (PhD 2023, Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft Turing), Krishna Nand Keshava Murthy (PhD 2022, Lead Data Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Zhizhong Chen (PhD 2021, Software Engineer at Twitter), Wen Li (PhD 2015, Software Engineer at Google).
M.Sc. (45)
Nianzi Yi, Selina Ücker, Leon Scharwächter, Michelle Schlicher, Felix Strothmann, Michael Giang, Simon Frank, Dominik Hildebrand (PhD candidate at University of Tübingen), Kora Helm, Marc Seelmann, David Bernhardt, Koyena Pal (PhD candidate at Northeastern University), Babak Hemmatian Borujeni (Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Ge Zhu, Priscilla Hernández, Kunyu Zhang, Li Zhu, Heiki Riesenkampf, Jannick Griner, Julian Fuchs, Ingo Schilken, Karl Ruszics (PhD candidate at ETH Zurich), Floran Gmehlin (Data Scientist at Pricehubble AG), Xing Wei (Developer at Google), Lennart van der Goten (Data Scientist at SAP), David Frank (Developer at Google), Ferenc Galko (Developer at Google), Rik Melis (Developer at AutoForm Engineering GmbH), Arturo Vivas, Dina Zverinski (Developer at Google), Yarden Raiskin (Developer at IBM), Felix Mance (Developer at Palantir), Immanuel Schwall (PhD candidate at ETH Zurich), Simon Greuter, Zsolt Mezei (Co-Founder at Gleblu AG), Jing Yang (PhD candidate at ETH Zurich), Faiza Alsaied (Developer at AutoForm Engineering GmbH), Rolf Jagerman (Developer at Google), Jan Wilken Dörrie (Developer at Facebook), Lukas Elmer (Co-Founder at Renuo AG), Maria Han Veiga (Assistant Professor at Ohio State University), Jared Niederhauser (Developer at GetYourGuide), Martin Davtyan (Data Scientist at Episteme Capital), Siddharth Sarda (Data Scientist at Booking.com), Marina Horlescu (Developer at Google), Florian Schmidt (PhD candidate at ETH Zurich), Pieter Dekker (Developer at Apprentice Uitgevers).
B.Sc. (21)
Eliza Gilbert, Marco Madeja, Saman Sang, Koyena Pal, Abdullah Ahmed, Karen Tu, Prakrit Baruah, Erica Guo, Jerome Ramos, Nicolas Mesot (MSc at ETH Zurich), Samuel Müller (MSc at ETH Zurich), Panuya Balasuntharam (MSc at ETH Zurich), Kevin Klein (MSc at ETH Zurich), Noah Hollmann (MSc at ETH Zurich), Angela Rellstab (MSc at ETH Zurich), Lorenz Kuhn (MSc at ETH Zurich), Philip Junker (MSc at ETH Zurich), Tobias Verhulst (MSc at ETH Zurich), Nino Weingart (MSc at ETH Zurich), Nina Zinsli (MSc at ETH Zurich), Kieran Nirkko (Intern at Google).
Doctoral Committees (26)
Ahmad-Reza Ehyaei (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Katrin Renz (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Paul Fischer (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Maria Heuss (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, PhD, expected), Denise Junger (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Johann Frei (University of Augsburg, Germany, PhD, expected), Junjie He (University of Stuttgart, Germany, PhD, expected), Prithivi Jung Thapa (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Tom Sühr (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Polina Tsvilodub (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Meghal Dani (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Raphael Scheible (TU Munich, Germany, PhD, expected), Rita González Márquez (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, expected), Diogo Nunes (University of Lisbon, Portugal, PhD, expected), Isabelle Loster (University of Tübingen, Germany, MD, 2025), David La Barbera (University of Udine, Italy, PhD, 2025), Mihai Horia Popescu (University of Udine, Italy, PhD, 2025), Hassan Shahmohammadi (University of Tübingen, Germany, PhD, 2024), Nirmal Roy (TU Delft, The Netherlands, PhD, 2024), Jiechen Xu (University of Queensland, Australia, PhD, 2024), Tim Draws (TU Delft, The Netherlands, PhD, 2023), Alexander Bondarenko (University of Jena, Germany, PhD, 2023), Austin R. Ward (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, PhD, 2023), Amir Ilkhechi (Brown University, USA, PhD, 2023), Babak Hemmatian Borujeni (Brown University, USA, PhD, 2021), Rolf Jagerman (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, PhD, 2020), Anton van der Vegt (University of Queensland, Australia, PhD, 2020), Navid Rekabsaz (TU Vienna, Austria, PhD, 2018).
Awards
| Award | Year |
|---|---|
| Computer Science Teaching Award (University of Tübingen) | 2024 |
| Best Paper Award (IEEE ICMLA) | 2022 |
| Manning Endowed Chair of Medical Science (Brown University) | 2022 |
| Best Short Paper Award (ECIR) | 2019 |
| Karen T. Romer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (Brown University) | 2019 |
| DHZK Research Paper of the Month | 2018 |
| Winning entry to the BioASQ Biomedical Question Answering Challenge | 2017 |
| Best Abstract Award (AIMed) | 2016 |
| Best Paper Honorable Mention (ACM SIGIR) | 2015 |
| Best Reviewer Award (ECIR) | 2014 |
| Microsoft Bing Most Innovative Paper Award | 2011 |
Grants
As PI (€8,648,958)
| Grant | Duration & Grant Amount |
|---|---|
| UNC-Tübingen Collaborative Seed Grant (PI) Explainable Clinical Decision Support Systems (University of Tübingen) |
2025 - 2026 €10,000 |
| ProfilPLUS (PI) Artificial Intelligence in Biomedicine (University of Tübingen) |
2023 - 2025 €75,600 |
| Covid-19 Relief Grant (PI) Explaining COVID-19 Outcome Disparities via Natural Language Processing (Peter G. Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Fund) |
2022 - 2023 $100,000 |
| NSF/III Medium (PI) Generative Neural Information Retrieval Models (National Science Foundation) |
2020 - 2024 $999,761 |
| OVPR Seed Award (PI) Finding Social Narratives in Big Data (Brown University) |
2020 - 2021 $71,000 |
| DARPA Seed (Co-PI) Cognitively-Motivated Word Learning in Embodied Virtual Agents (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) |
2019 - 2022 $954,509 |
| IARPA BETTER (Co-PI) Task-and-User Aware Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) |
2019 - 2023 $6,100,000 |
| NSF Workshop Support (PI) Student Travel Support for ACM WSDM 2019 (National Science Foundation) |
2018 - 2019 $18,450 |
| OVPR Big Data Seed Grant (PI) Forecasting Patterns of Delirium and Early Recovery After Acute Stroke (Brown University) |
2018 - 2019 $25,000 |
| NSF Workshop Support (PI) Doctoral Consortium for HCOMP 2018 (National Science Foundation) |
2018 - 2019 $24,000 |
| SNSF Ambizione (PI) Representation Learning for Clinical Artificial Intelligence (Swiss National Science Foundation) |
2017 - 2019 CHF 743,444 |
| Microsoft Azure for Research Grant (PI) Statistically Robust Multi-criteria Relevance Modelling (Microsoft) |
2013 - 2014 $47,000 |
As Co-I (€66,737,557)
| Grant | Duration & Grant Amount |
|---|---|
| DFG Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning: New Perspectives for Science (German Research Foundation) |
2026 - 2032 €50,000,000 |
| NIH/AHRQ R01 Evaluating Diagnostic Decision Support Systems for Patients Requiring Urgent Primary or Emergency Care or with Stroke (National Institutes of Health) |
2023 - 2028 $1,929,759 |
| NIH/NIGMS COBRE Rhode Island Hospital Injury Control Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (National Institutes of Health) |
2021 - 2026 $14,807,798 |
As Co-PI (€2,207,641)
| Grant & Grantee | Duration & Grant Amount |
|---|---|
| NIH NHLBI K01 Maya Vadiveloo |
2023 - 2028 $861,550 |
| ACM SIGHPC Computational & Data Science Fellowship Tassallah Abdullahi |
2022 - 2026 $60,000 |
| Fulbright Research Award Kevin Du |
2022 - 2023 $24,054 |
| NIH AdvanceCTR Pilot Joshua Kemp |
2022 - 2023 $37,430 |
| NIH NIMH K23 Taylor Burke |
2021 - 2026 $978,240 |
| ERC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship Augusto García-Agúndez |
2022 - 2025 €245,732 |
| SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship Seyed Ali Bahrainian |
2020 - 2021 CHF 75,450 |
| CSC Chinese Government Scholarship Yuanfei Dai |
2019 - 2020 $30,000 |
Service to the Community
Board Positions
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2025 – 2028 | Steering Committee Member, ACM ICTIR |
| 2022 – 2025 | Treasurer, ACM SIGIR |
| 2023 | Award Selection Committee 2023, ECIR |
| 2020 - present | Steering Committee Member, Cross Language Eval. Forum (CLEF) |
| 2020 - present | Steering Committee Member, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub |
Chair
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Co-Chair, SIGIR Explainability in IR Workshop |
| 2022 | Reproducibility Track Co-Chair, ECIR |
| 2020 | Co-Chair, CLEF Labs Organizing Committee |
| 2020 | Co-Chair, WSDM Health Search and Data Mining Workshop |
| 2019 | Doctoral Consortium Chair, ACM WSDM |
| 2018 | Doctoral Consortium Chair, AAAI HCOMP |
| 2018 | Proceedings Chair, ACM SIGIR |
| 2017 - 2018 | Co-Chair, ImageCLEF Biomedical Captioning Track |
| 2013 | General Chair, Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) |
| 2011 - 2012 | Co-Chair, CIKM BooksOnline Workshop |
Editor
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2023 - present | Associate Editor, Information Retrieval |
| 2020 - present | Associate Editor, Frontiers in Publich Health |
| 2020 - present | Review Editor, Frontiers in Computer Science |
| 2022 | Guest Editor, Frontiers in Computer Science |
| 2021 | Guest Editor, Frontiers in Pharmacology |
| 2022 | Guest Editor, MDPI Sensors |
| 2017 | Guest Editor, Springer Information Retrieval Journal |
Senior Area Chair
- European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)
Senior Program Committee Member
- ACM Conference on Research & Development in IR (SIGIR)
- Association for Computational Linguistics Rolling Review (ACL)
- The Web Conferences (WWW)
- ACM International Conference on Web search & Data Mining (WSDM)
- European Conference on Information Retrival (ECIR)
Reviewer (selected)
- Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
- The Web Conference (WebConf)
- ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD)
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)
- Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI)
- Communications of the ACM (CACM)
- ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency (FAccT)
- ACM Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM)
- IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
- ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
- Methods in Medical Informatics
- ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
- PLOS ONE
- Cancer Medicine
- AMIA Annual Symposium
- AMIA Informatics Summit
- IEEE ICHI Workshop on Health Natural Language Processing
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems Technology (TIST)
- Elsevier Information Processing & Management (IPM)
- Elsevier Information Systems
- IEEE International Symposium on Computer Based Medical Systems (CBMS)
- International Workshop on Health Natural Language Processing (HealthNLP)
- ACM SIGIR Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR)
- Asia Information Retrieval Societies Conference (AIRS)
- Semantic Web Journal
- IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC)
- Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE)
- Living Labs for Information Retrieval Evaluation (CIKM)
- Russian Information Retrieval Workshop (RussIR)
- Workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval (GamifIR)
- Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Gamification in the Cloud (CGCloud)
- Workshop on Searching 4 Fun at IIiX
- Workshop on Context-awareness in Retrieval and Recommendation (CARR)
- ECIR Workshop on Semantic Indexing and Information Retrieval for Health
Review Panels
- German Research Foundation (DFG)
- National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
- European Commission (EC)
- Belgian National Science Foundation (BelSPO)
- Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
Service to the University
Board Positions
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2021 - 2024 | Campus Advisory Board Member, Data Science Initiative |
| 2020 - 2023 | Research Lead for Big Data and Analytics, Center for Digital Health |
| 2021 | Steering Committee Member, Hack for STEM Diversity |
Chair
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2022 - Present | Data Science and Access Committee, University of Tübingen |
| 2019 - 2020 | Events Committee, Center for Biomedical Informatics |
Chair
| Year | Position |
|---|---|
| 2022 | PhD Admission Committee, Center for Computational Molecular Biology |
| 2018 - 2022 | PhD Admission Committee, Computer Science Department |
| 2019 - 2020 | CTR Oversite Committee, Center for Biomedical Informatics |
| 2019 - 2020 | Curriculum/Admissions Committee, Center for Biomedical Informatics |
| 2019 - 2021 | Seed Award Reviewer Committee, OVPR |
| 2020 | UTRA Selection Committee, Brown University |
| 2021 | AI/ML in Medicine CoP, Brown University |
| 2021 | Pilot Projects, AdvanceCTR |
Professional Memberships
| Membership | Year |
|---|---|
| Professional Member, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) | 2019 - Present |
| Full Member, Swiss Society for Medical Informatics (SGMI) | 2016 - Present |
| Professional Member, Inst. Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) | 2015 - Present |
| Full Member, ACM Special Interest Group on IR (SIGIR) | 2012 - Present |
| Professional Member, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) | 2011 - Present |
Media
| Media, Autor, Article/Piece | Date |
|---|---|
| Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Piotr Heller, “Warum Chatbots keine Ärzte sind” | 10-15-2025 |
| Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Piotr Heller, “Der Chatarzt” | 02-03-2025 |
| Reutlinger Generalanzeiger, Miriam Steinrücken, “Chat-GPT as a Giant Opportunity” | 04-29-2023 |
| SWR Aktuell, Kay-Uwe Hennig, “Automatic Text Generation with Chat-GPT. [German Original]” | 02-01-2023 |
| Kronenzeitung, Erich Vogel, “Corona and the Healthcare System in Turmoil. [German Original]” | 09-21-2021 |
| Tiroler Tageszeitung, Nicole Strozzi, “How Machines Change Medicine [German Original]” | 07-01-2021 |
| E-HEALTH-COM, Philipp Grätzel, “Algorithms Predict Bleeding and Kidney Failure [German Original]” | 10-09-2018 |
| Slate Magazine, Michael Agger, “Google Kids: The Sequel” | 06-04-2011 |