A warm welcome to Christoph Karl Heck
We are delighted to welcome Christoph Karl Heck as a PhD student at the Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI) at ETH Zürich, as part of the Core Digital Biomarkers in Driver Health and Safety, working on the Revelio study. His focus is detecting cannabis-impaired driving, both before and during driving. He aims to reduce traffic fatalities and offer cannabis patients a fair and objective assessment of their fitness to drive using modern machine learning techniques.
Christoph holds a BSc. in Business Information Systems from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences In 2021, he spent seven months at CERN in Geneva, working in IT, mathematics, and robotics. There, he developed the CMS Public Results portal. He completed his bachelor’s thesis at start-up Intom GmbH by building a hybrid control system that combined a PLC and an embedded system to control a CT scanner for quality assurance of additive-manufactured parts. He then continued working there as an embedded software engineer until the deployment at a customer site.
He also holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Konstanz, where he focused on cyber-physical systems. Specifically he implemented deep learning on an STM32 microcontroller, combining ExecuTorch with the real-time operating system Mbed OS to enable energy-efficient, long-term environmental monitoring using phytosensing on ivy plants. During this time, he also contributed to his first scientific publications.
In 2018, Christoph was diagnosed with a disease that changed the way he thought about his work and future. The surgeon operated on him using a da Vinci Surgical System, a robotic platform for minimally invasive procedures, shown to significantly reduce the risk of mortality and post-surgery pain.
As a patient, Christoph realized how much he was benefiting from a society invested in medical engineering and research. This experience had a profound personal impact on him and sparked his desire to meaningfully contribute to society. With this fresh perspective, he approached his studies with a renewed sense of purpose.