people

Janna Hastings is Senior Research Scientist and Group Leader of the Human-Centered Health AI Research Group.

Janna was born in Cape Town, South Africa where she completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Computer Science. Thereafter, she moved to Cambridge, UK to join the Cheminformatics and Metabolism group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (2006-2015) where she led the development of the ChEBI molecular ontology and metabolism knowledgebase. She completed part-time Master’s degrees in Computer Science (University of South Africa, 2011) and Philosophy (Open University, 2012). She obtained her PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Cambridge (2015-2019), where she studied the role of metabolism in healthy aging using multi-omics data and a time-series modelling approach. She completed postdoctoral studies at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (2019-2022) working at the intersection between knowledge-based systems and artificial intelligence, at the EPFL (2020-2022) in neurodegenerative disease bioinformatics, and with the Human Behaviour-Change Project at University College London (2017-2022) where she helped to create an artificial intelligence-driven knowledge system for evidence about human behavior change to support decision-making, policy and practice.

Between August 2022 and December 2025 she was Assistant Professor of Medical Knowledge and Decision Support at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zurich, and Vice-Director of the School of Medicine at the University of St. Gallen. There, she worked on biomedical and clinical AI, knowledge resources, evidence synthesis, and decision support systems, alongside methodological research on large language and multi-modal models and interpretability.

Since January 2026, she has taken up the position of Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute where she leads a group focused on advancing AI methods for health-related applications, particularly hybrid approaches that combine knowledge with large-scale data.

Charlotte Tumescheit is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Human-Centered Health AI group.

Charlotte studied Mathematics at Free University Berlin (2009-2014). She then worked as a software developer for a consulting firm in Berlin (2015-2016). She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge (2016-2020), where she studied computational methods for RNA structure prediction in RNA viruses.

She then went on as a researcher at Seoul National University (2021-2022), where she was part of the team developing a tool for fast and accurate protein structure search. Afterwards, she worked on genomics data as a R&D associate at a diagnostics company in Japan (2022-2024).

Between March 2024 and December 2025, Charlotte was with our group in its previous institutional home at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care at the University of Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher. With the move to Idiap, as of January 2026, Charlotte will continue her work on approaches to knowledge injection and interpretability for AI models of biomolecules in the context of the StrOntEx and MetabolLinkAI projects.

Miranda Carlsson is a PhD Student in the Human-Centered Health AI group.

Miranda studied Biotechnology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. This included a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology (2020-2023) and a Master’s degree in Complex Adaptive Systems (2023 -2025). As part of her Master’s, she did an exchange year in Japan at Kyoto University (2023/24). Miranda did her master’s thesis as a collaboration between Chalmers and AstraZeneca, where she optimised a machine learning model for metabolite prediction in drug discovery.

Between September and December 2025, Miranda was with our group in its previous institutional home at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care at the University of Zurich. With our move to Idiap in January 2026, Miranda will continue her work on metabolite functional prediction and AI-augmented biomolecular discovery in the context of the MetaboLinkAI project.

Björn Gehrke is a Research Assistant and Scientific Software Engineer in the Human-Centered Health AI group.

Björn pursued his Bachelor’s and Masters’s degree in Computer Science at Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg from 2018 to 2024. From 2016 to 2020, Björn worked as a software developer.

Between October 2023 and December 2025, Björn was employed as a Semantic Technologist in our group at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care at the University of Zurich. There, he is focused on facilitating the development and management of ontologies. Since January 2026 he moved with the rest of the group to the Idiap Research Institute.

Maya Braun is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ghent, Belgium and University College London, and externally affiliated with the Human-Centered Health AI group.

Maya studied clinical psychology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Ghent University (2015 – 2020), and is studying statistical data analysis at Ghent University (2021-). She defended her dissertation titled “Personalized recommendations beyond the black box: the development and evaluation of an ontology of action and coping plans for physical activity.” at Ghent University in June 2024, obtaining her interdisciplinary PhD in Psychology and Computer Science Engineering.

After finishing her PhD, she continued to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent Health Psychology lab. Her research interests focus on (health) behaviour change, digital health and personalization, and the definition and measurement of psychological constructs.

Maya joined the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care at the University of Zurich in October 2024 as a postdoctoral researcher, where she worked on the APRICOT adn Beyond the Barriers projects. The aim of the APRICOT project is to expand the existing behaviour change intervention ontology, and develop tools and resources to build adoption of and engagement wit the ontology.

Paula Muhr is an external affiliate with the Human-Centered Health AI research group.

Paula studied physics, theory of literature, and visual arts in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Leipzig. She holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Fine Arts in Leipzig (2009) and is a practising visual artist. She obtained her PhD in Art and Visual History from Humboldt University Berlin (2021), where she investigated active functions that diverse types of images played in generating medical knowledge of hysteria/functional neurological disorder from the late 19th to early 21st century.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for History of Art and Architecture, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2022-2023), where she worked on the DFG project “Browser Art” and conducted her own research into the algorithmic reconstruction of images from sparse data in neuroimaging and black hole imaging.

Paula is an active member of the History Philosophy and Culture (HPC) Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) Collaboration and, since January 2024, a visiting researcher at the Department for Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Technical University Berlin. Her research focus is on examining knowledge-producing functions of new imaging and visualisation technologies in natural sciences, from neuroscience to medicine to physics.