Daniel C. Baumgart

Professor and Director
Division of Gastroenterology
Director, Inflammatory Bowel Disease Unit
College of Health Sciences
Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta

Daniel C. Baumgart, MD PhD MBA FACP FRCP (London) AGAF went to medical school in Berlin, Basle (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, USA, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, MD, USA.

Prior to his current appointment as University Professor and Director, Division of Gastroenterology, Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Unit at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada he served as 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 Stiftung Charite foundation. He was Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT and Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA. and Peking University, Beijing, China.

Dr. Baumgart 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. He has been principal investigator in some 200 multinational clinical trials. His laboratory is focused on the investigation of human dendritic cells in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel diseases.

A trailblazer of digital innovation, 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. A founding member of the University of Alberta Precision Health Signature Area he chairs the Digestive Health Provincial Connect Care Working Group and build the first provincial Connect Care Registry of all inflammatory bowel disease patients in Alberta to develop smart decision support tools. His work on artificial intelligence enabled medical decision support in collaboration with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), the Alberta Health Services Chief Medical Information Office, Analytics, Data Integration, Measurement and Reporting, Virtual Health Unit, as wells as the Alberta Innovates Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) Support Unit have received grant support from the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He is the principal investigator of the Alberta Precision Health Innovation, Research and Technology Ecosystem (PRECISE) funded by the Health Innovation Partnership Program of Alberta Innovates. In a recent NatureDigital Medicine article he describes how the pandemic accelerates digital innovation in medicine and healthcare.

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 elected scientific committee member of the Canadian IBD Research Consortium (CIRC / CCRM) and elected executive board member of the German IBD Compentence Network within the German Society for Gastroenterology (DGVS) 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 Volkswagen Stiftung 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.