Prof. Sabine Brunswicker is an internationally recognized scholar in digital innovation, and an interdisciplinary trained computational socio-technical scientist whose work bridges AI, machine and deep learning (ML/DL), decision sciences as well as complex systems engineering. She is a Full Professor at Purdue University and the Founder of the Center for Artificial Intelligence for Digital, Autonomous, and Augmented Aviation (AIDA3), a consortium founded by Purdue University and Windracers LLC, an entrepreneurial company producing the heavy-lift ULTRA drone. She also launched AIrTonomy, a cyber-physical infrastructure program for rapid experimentation and safety verification of AI-enabled autonomy for aviation. Before joining Purdue, she led a research group at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany's largest research organization, promoting user-inspired research.
Her and her collaborators' recent research focuses on deep learning for the design and understanding of complex, cyber-physical systems, with a focus on human-autonomy teaming, guided by the goal to ensure safety, trustworthy, and interpretable interactions in distributed intelligence and control. For example, she studies generative AI and natural language interfaces for drone operators, integrates formal logic in learning-based approaches for safety verification, builds new neuro-symbolic architectures for model-predictive control, and explores quantum-enhanced machine learning for belief inference in adversarial situations. Beyond scientific curiosity, one of her passions is to form and build interdisciplinary research teams that seek to solve grant challenges and build transformative experimental testbeds, guided by principles of user-inspired basic research and a lab-to-life vision. To support such interdisciplinary research, over the last years, she has led many large interdisciplinary grant proposal development efforts targeting federal agencies, foundations and directed industry sponsors, including federal appropriations for earmark and programmatic funding support. For example, since 2024 she and her collaborators have engaged in fund raising effort of $50M and higher, with some individual projects having a budget of $20M.
Dr. Brunswicker's work has appeared in impact journals and conferences spanning disciplines such as information systems, artificial intelligence, NLP, human-computer interaction, aviation research, health informatics, and also innovation sciences (e.g. EMNLP, AAAI, Neurocomputing, Computers in Human Behavior, Big Data Research, Scientometrics, GIQ, JASIST, AIAA SciTech, JMIR, MISQ, Research Policy, ICC, Technovation, IJIM). She has advised and mentored multiple undergraduate, graduate students (Master and PhD students), post-docs, as well as visiting professors and more senior research staff (e.g. research scholars, research engineers) in the role of a chair, committee member or co-author.
As part of her educational efforts, Sabine has led the development of undergraduate interdisciplinary project-based education as well as graduate education, guided by vision to blend research and experimental, and project-based education and learning. She has also significant experience in industry-focused education, including programs targeting scientists, engineers, and executive employed at small and large corporations or military organizations. Her research has been supported by many federal agencies (NSF, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, the European Commission), foundations and industry donations. As a user-inspired researcher she works closely with engineers and scientists in industry and defense organizations, including Windracers LLC, Saab Inc., Accenture, Red Hat, the Navy and the National Guard, and has extensive experience in engaging policy makers to seek support for transformative research and infrastructure efforts. She is also regular invited guest speaker at prestigious universities and research centers like Oxford, CMU, Santa Fe Complexity Institute as well as thought leader organizations and associations like the World Economic Forum,IEEE CS or AUVSI.
In November 2025, the German Investment Forum nominated her as one of the Top 32 German AI Experts to be considered for a Global AI expert award. regular invited guest speaker at events organized by the World Economic Forum, NSF, AUVSI Association, and other institutions.