Sandy Engelhardt

Sandy Engelhardt, PhD, is a Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Cardiovascular Medicine at Heidelberg University Hospital and the Medical Faculty of Heidelberg University. The main research goal of her group is to leverage AI for cardiovascular precision medicine.

Her dissertation won the BVM-Award 2017 for the best PhD thesis awarded from the German Medical Image Processing Community in field of Computer-assisted mitral valve repair. Together with her team, she runs a multicentric Federated Learning Initiative in DZHK between eight medical centers in Germany. She is speaker of the Multi-dimension AI consortium in the area of HFpEF funded by the Carl Zeiss Foundation by 5 Mio €. Furthermore, she is Programme Chair of the ESC Digital and AI Summit 2025 organized by the European Society of Cardiology. She is also an integral part of the EU Horizon DVPS Project for training of Foundation Models, where she leads the Working Package of all Application Domains.

Her group develops cutting-edge AI methods and strengthens this key technology across disciplines. The research group focuses on the analysis of cardiovascular imaging and surgical procedures (MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, ECG, etc.) along the treatment path. This includes developing solutions for surgical AI. Her main goal within the innovation committee is to bring together key stakeholders and to foster intraoperative data recording, synchronization and processing for an AI-ready cardiothoracic environment.

Since 2024, she has been active in several European medical societies. She holds the Chair for AI in the EACTS Innovation Committee. As part of the ESC Digital Cardiology and AI Committee, she is Subgroup Lead for Education and Outreach. As Programme Chair for the ESC Digital and AI Summit 2025 conference, she is primarily responsible for the event’s programme and for linking the areas of computer science/AI and cardiovascular research. She is also active in the ESC Programme Committee and the EHRA Digital Medicine and mHealth Committee. As DZHK Principal Investigator, she supports the strategic definition of the AI platform and is newly elected co-speaker of the Focus group HFpEF.