Dr Stefan Harrer

Stefan turns ideas into reality. As scientist, incubator, strategic advisor and executive manager he builds and works with interdisciplinary, diverse technical and commercial teams at the intersection of digital health, neurotech, the life sciences, and AI. Integrating safe and trustworthy AI systems into cloud and edge platforms to bring assistive data analytics and scalable data management tools to human decision makers in health, biotech, MedTech, and pharma is his core skill. He is an expert in producing and commercializing innovations in AI and science across complex, highly regulated environments spanning industry, academia, and government.

Following corporate strategic advisory roles in the US and APAC as Scientific Assistant to the Lab Director of IBM Research Australia, Technical Assistant to IBM‘s VP Cognitive Computing, and Member of the Neuroethics Advisory Group to the Director and SVP of IBM Research, Stefan founded the Brain-Inspired Computing Program of IBM Research Australia. As its Technical Lead and Senior Manager he grew it into IBM's Epilepsy Research Program spearheading the development of AI for managing neurological diseases. Working with clinical institutions such as Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital Stefan attracted investment of over $20M and, in a world-first, built AI capable of automatically predicting epileptic seizures using a wearable. As Chief Innovation Officer of Digital Health CRC Ltd. he then managed the AI tech portfolio of the $200M incubator and fund. In his current role as our Director AI4Science Stefan has co-founded, built, and now leads a multi-$M global innovation, research and commercialisation program for transforming scientific discovery through the commoditised use of AI agents. Our flagship product? Sciansa. A multi-agent lab assistant platform that helps over 4,000 researchers make discoveries faster and smarter—from biology to robotics. MVP launched. Early adopter program live.

Stefan serves as mentor to start-ups and advisor to government agencies and clinical institutions in the US, Europe, and APAC. He enjoys spreading ideas and exciting others. As a TEDx speaker, Creative Destruction Lab Mentor and IBM Master Inventor he holds 74 granted patents. IBM inducted him to the IBM Academy of Technology and to IBM's Health and Life Sciences Research Council. He has authored 65 papers in journals of publishers such as Nature, The Lancet, JAMA, Cell Press, IJCAI, AAAI, NeurIPS, and IEEE and is an Adjunct Professor at UTS, IEEE Senior Member, Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and of Forbes Technology Council. Stefan passionately advocates for using AI for good. Follow him on LinkedIn to read, watch, and hear about his work and ideas on ABC News, Forbes, WIRED Magazine, The World Economic Forum, TED, and Popular Science.