Dr. phil. nat. Sebastian Lobentanzer

Sebastian Lobentanzer is a computational biomedicine researcher and Principal Investigator at Helmholtz Munich's Computational Health Center. Trained as a pharmacist at Goethe University Frankfurt, he completed his PhD in pharmacology and clinical pharmacy (summa cum laude), studying small RNA dynamics in cholinergic systems under the supervision of Jochen Klein (Frankfurt) and Hermona Soreq (Jerusalem). During his postdoctoral research at Heidelberg University Hospital in the Saez-Rodriguez lab, he developed two open-source platforms: BioCypher, a framework for building FAIR knowledge graphs (Nature Biotechnology 2023), and BioChatter, a platform for biomedical applications of large language models (Nature Biotechnology 2025). This work secured over EUR 2 million in competitive funding for biomedical infrastructure developments. In 2025, he joined Helmholtz Munich as a Helmholtz AI Young Investigator, where his research focuses on the structured governance and empirical evaluation of agentic AI systems in biomedicine. He developed the Agentic Automation Canvas, a FAIR-compliant framework for the prospective design and governance of agentic AI deployments. Beyond his research, Sebastian advises German federal agencies and EU bodies on frontier AI strategy — including the German Ministry of Health, the RKI, IQWiG, and BIOEG — and leads European agentic AI initiatives through the ELIXIR task force and Helmholtz AI interest group. He also serves as Head of Computational Biology at the German Diabetes Research Centre (DZD) and holds a TUM Junior Fellowship.