Elsa A. Kirchner studied Biology and began her research career in 1999 at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in Boston, USA. Subsequently she became head of the Brain & Behavioral Lab in the Robotics Group at the University of Bremen, Germany. In parallel, she worked for the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). There she led teams in human-machine interaction and interactive machine learning. Since 2021, she has been a professor for " Medical Technology Systems " at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and continues to cooperate with the DFKI. Since 2022, she has been co-chair of Working Group 7 "Learning Robotic Systems" of Germanys PlaXorm “Lernende Systeme” and a founding member of the DLR network Space2Health. In 2023, she was appointed as a member of the Council for Technological Sovereignty of the BMBF. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, focusing on the analysis of multimodal biosignals recorded from humans. Further she applies ML methods to use biosignals to enable or improve human-robot interaction. She also conducts research on robot learning from humans and on embedded and embodied AI.