Georg Starke
Fields of expertise
Biography
Georg Starke is a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Humanities at EPFL, working in the Intelligent Systems Ethics Group. Trained as philosopher and physician, he conducts research at the intersection of AI ethics, medical ethics, and neuroscience. His current work on the Hybrid Minds project focuses on AI-based neurotechnology, relating fundamental philosophical and ethical questions to empirical work in the field.Georg studied medicine in Munich with clinical electives in Oxford, Buenos Aires, and Jerusalem and completed his medical doctorate at the TU Munich with a thesis on neural correlates of human fear. In parallel, he obtained a BA in philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy and an MPhil in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. After receiving his medical license, he worked as reserch assistant at the Institute for Biomedical Ethics at the Univesity of Basel, examining the notion of trust in medical AI. He finished his PhD with summa cum laude in 2022.
Georg received scholarships from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Max Weber Programme and the HPS Trust Fund of the University of Cambridge. His work received international awards, among them the Paul Schotsmans Prize from the European Association of Centers for Medical Ethics, and he was granted two research residencies at the Fondation Brocher in Switzerland. In parallel to his appointment at EPFL, Georg holds appointments as postdoc at the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich and as lecturer for medical ethics at the Munich School of Philosophy.
Education
PhD in Bioethics (Dr. phil.)
Title: Trusting Black-Box Algorithms? Ethical Challenges for Biomedical Machine Learning
University of Basel, Institute for Biomedical Ethics, Faculty of Science
2022
Doctorate in Medicine (Dr. med.)
Title: The ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus, fear and its regulation in the human brain
Technical University of Munich, Faculty of Medicine
2020
German Medical License (Approbation)
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Technical University of Munich, Faculty of Medicine
2018
Master in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine (MPhil)
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University of Cambridge (Clare College)
2016
Bachelor in Philosophy (BA)
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Munich School of Philosophy
2014
Awards
Visiting Researcher
Fondation Brocher, Hermance
2023
Best Poster Award
ERA-NET Neuron Symposium, Madrid
2023
Visiting Researcher
Fondation Brocher, Hermance
2021
Paul Schotsmans Prize
European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME)
2019
Cross-border Education Award
EUCOR – The European Campus (with Philipp Kellmeyer)
2019
Scholarship
Rausing, Williamson and Lipton Fund, University of Cambridge
2015
Scholarship
Max Weber Program Bavaria
2009
Scholarship
German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes)
2009
Publications
Selected publications
Starke, G., Schmidt, B., De Clercq, E., & Elger, B.S. (2022) AI and Ethics |
Explainability as fig leaf? An exploration of experts’ ethical expectations towards machine learning in psychiatry |
Starke, G., van den Brule, R., Elger, B. S., & Haselager, W. F. G. (2022) Bioethics, 36(2), 154-161 |
Intentional Machines: A Defense of Trust in Medical AI. |
Starke, G., & Poppe, C. (2022) Ethics And Information Technology 24(3) |
Karl Jaspers and artificial neural nets: on the relation of explaining and understanding artificial intelligence in medicine |
Starke, G., De Clercq, E., & Elger, B. S. (2021) Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 24(3), 341-349 |
Towards a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in medical machine learning. |
Starke, G., De Clercq, E., Borgwardt, S., & Elger, B. S. (2021) Psychological Medicine, 51(15), 2515-2521 |
Computing schizophrenia: Ethical challenges for machine learning in psychiatry. |
Starke, G., De Clercq, E., Borgwardt, S., & Elger, B. S. (2021) Psychological Medicine, 51(14), 2512-2513 |
Why educating for clinical machine learning still requires attention to history: A rejoinder to Gauld et al |
Zimmermann, B., Starke, G., Shaw, D., Elger, B., & Koné, I. (2020) Swiss Medical Weekly, 150(2728) |
Actionability and scope should determine the extent of counselling for presymptomatic genetic testing |
Mulej Bratec, S., Bertram, T., Starke, G., Brandl, F., Xie, X., & Sorg, C. (2020) Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 15(5), 561-570 |
Your presence soothes me: a neural process model of aversive emotion regulation via social buffering10.1093/scan/nsaa068. |