Kerstin Denecke

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Denecke is a Professor at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) in the Engineering and Computer Science department, where she co-leads the Institute for Patient-centered Digital Health (PCDH). She maintains an affiliate position at the University of Victoria's School of Health Information Science and has conducted research visits at Canadian and New Zealand institutions. Her academic journey includes leadership roles in national and EU research projects, heading the 'Digital Patient Model' research group at Leipzig University prior to joining BFH in 2015.

Dr. Denecke's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare, with particular expertise in natural language processing, conversational agents, and patient-centered digital health solutions. Her work spans multiple clinical domains including mental health interventions, radiology documentation, and suicide prevention. She employs participatory design methodologies that actively involve healthcare professionals and patients in the development process.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a strong emphasis on the practical application of large language models in clinical settings, ethical considerations in healthcare AI, and the development of taxonomies for conversational agents. Her research demonstrates a consistent trajectory toward making AI tools clinically usable while addressing real-world healthcare challenges.

• Young Talent Award of the Friedrich Wingert Foundation for outstanding approaches in medical linguistics and semantics
• Best Poster Award at MIE 2021 for 'Crowdsourcing for Creating a Dataset for Training a Medication Chatbot'

Professor Denecke actively supervises bachelor, master, and PhD students, with current doctoral candidates working on medical text classification, social media chatbots for physical activity, and NLP applications in radiology. Her research is supported by multiple active grants including Innosuisse-funded projects on generative AI for clinical documentation. She leads the PCDH/AI for Health research unit which develops practical AI solutions for healthcare challenges while maintaining strong connections with clinical partners.

The Institute for Patient-centered Digital Health under her co-leadership focuses on developing human-centered digital health solutions that address real clinical needs through interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, healthcare professionals, and patients.