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 and Principal of the Center for Artificial Intelligence for Digital, Autonomous, and Augmented Aviation (AIDA3), a a consortium established in 2024 betweeen Purdue University and Windracers LLC, an entrepreneurial company producing the heavy-lift ULTRA drone. In 2024, she also launched AIrTonomy, a cyber-physical infrastructure program for rapid experimentation and safety verification of AI-enabled autonomy for aviation. In 2014, she was also the Founding Director the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI), focused on new organizational systems for organizing the process of innovation in an open, self-organizing way with the help of digital technologies. In 2016, she and her RCODI team launched Purdue IronHacks, a Kaggle-style data science platform, that supported more than 2,000 individuals around the world to participate in machine learning competitions "in the cloud".
Before joining Purdue, she led a research group at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany’s largest research organization, promoting user-inspired research. In addition, Dr. Sabine Brunswicker has held numerous visiting positions at reputed organizations, such as Northwestern University (at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICOs), University of Technology in Munich (TU Munich, Germany), and ESADE Business School (Spain).
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.
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) (see google scholar for more details here). Her work has been supported by many federal agencies (NSF, NIH, DARPA, the European Commission), foundations, as well as 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, Navy Research and others. Further, she has extensive experience in communicating with policy makers to seek support for transformative research and infrastructure efforts. She is also regular invited guest speaker at events organized by the World Economic Forum, NSF, AUVSI Association, and other institutions. 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.
Sabine holds a Master in Mechanical Engineering and Management Sciences (Double-Degree; University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany), a Master of Commerce with a specialization in Marketing and Entrepreneurship (UNSW, Sydney, Australia), and a PhD in Engineering Sciences with a focus on Industrial Engineering, System Dynamics, and Technology Management (University of Stuttgart, School of Engineering Design, Production Engineering, and Automotive Engineering, Germany).