Daniel C. Baumgart, MD PhD MBA went to medical school in Berlin, Basel (Switzerland) and Wuerzburg (Bavaria). 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.
Until 2017 he served as University Professor and Deputy Chief of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Charite Medical School of the Humboldt-University of Berlin, and elected Fellow at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) endowed by the StiftungCharite foundation. Since then he has been appointed as University Professor and Director, Division of Gastroenterology, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In their 2022 Best Global Universities U.S. News & World Report ranked Gastroenterology and Hepatology as the No. 1 at the University of Alberta, No. 2 in Canada and No. 28 worldwide. He was Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT and Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA.
Dr. Baumgart also directs the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Unit, is actively involved in the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic concepts for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis including new modalities of optical detection to visualize inflammation, mucosal damage and epithelial restitution and image guided intervention as discussed in his 2021 New England Journal of Medicine article. In a Nature Scientific Report his research group investigated how well several deep learning convolutional neural network architectures applied to the largest multi-class digestive image and video dataset available to date, diagnose and ulcerative colitis and assess disease severity. Dr. Baumgart has been principal investigator in some 200 multinational clinical trials and serves co-principal investigator in the Inflammation, Microbiome & Alimentation, Gastro-Intestinal & Neuropsychiatric Effects Specific Patient Oriented Research IMAGINE-SPOR Network funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
A trailblazer of digital innovation, Adjunct University Professor of Computing Science, Faculty of Science, Department of Computing Science and member of the Precision Health and AI4Society Signature Areas he has a strong interest in digital health, artificial intelligence (AI) and decision support ultimately aiming to provide precision medicine at the point of care. In a Nature Digital Medicine article he describes how the pandemic accelerates digital innovation in medicine and healthcare. He chairs the Digestive Health Provincial Electronic Health Record (ConnectCare) Working Group and built the first Connect Care registry of all inflammatory bowel disease patients in Alberta. Dr. Baumgart is the 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) program launched in 2022. 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. Furthermore, his research in collaboration with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Kule Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS), and Alberta Health Services received grant support from the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Alberta Innovates.
Dr. Baumgart has been serving on the editorial boards of leading medical and scientific journals including The Lancet, Gut and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases as well as on the executive of the Canadian IBD Research Consortium and the German IBD Competence Network and sits on various other international panels including the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organization.
A BMW Herbert Quandt Foundation responsible leadership alumnus he developed an innovative integrated clinical and research training curriculum for academic physicians, that received numerous awards including the VolkswagenStiftung foundation's Off the Beaten Track award for its extraordinary design and visionary impetus to academia and has been approved by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the German Council of Science and Humanities (WR) and adopted by German medical schools nationwide.
In 2013 Dr. Baumgart was appointed fellow, American College of Physicians (FACP), Philadelphia; in 2014 fellow, American Gastroenterological Association (AGAF), Bethesda; and in 2017 Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (FRCP), London, UK.