Profile

Benjamin Lipp is Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He received his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from the Technical University of Munich in 2019. Before joining DTU in 2023, he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and the University of Hamburg.

His research draws on theories and methods from STS and sociology to study the socio-material ways, through which humans and machines interface, particularly in the domain of healthcare.

In his dissertation, Benjamin conducted one of the first sociological studies of assistive care robots in Europe. It showed how this field reconfigures arrangements of care in light of wider policy imperatives. In the H2020 funded research project SCALINGS, he continued this line of research by examining the potential role of health professionals and older people in driving the co-creation of robots to increase health and wellbeing of older people. As Marie Curie fellow, he examined the uptake of digital neuro-technology in the domain of chronic pain management in the United States, focusing on users’ long-term lived experience.

The findings of his research have been published in numerous invited talks, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles in renowned international journals such as Social Studies of Science, and Science, Technology & Human Values.

Next to academic research, Benjamin has spearheaded a number of public engagement and co-creation initiatives: for example, a public engagement event on care robots at TUM in 2017, and a cross-disciplinary workshop on digital pain technology at Cornell in 2023. These activities engaged researchers, industry, practitioners, patients, and citizens in societal issues around digital health technology and explored new ways of interfacing humans and machines in a responsible way.