Career

Professor Barbara Deml graduated in psychology from the University of Regensburg in 2001. She then obtained a doctorate in engineering at the Institute for Ergonomics at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich as part of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre High-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleaction. In her doctoral dissertation, she addressed the design of haptic human-machine interfaces in the context of telerobotics.

After a research period at the Technical University of Munich and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, she returned to the University of the Bundeswehr as Assistant Professor of Cognitive Ergonomics. She then accepted a position as an associate professor at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, where she was appointed to the chair of Work Science and Work Design.

In 2012, she accepted a professorship at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Since then, she has been head of the Institute for Human and Industrial Engineering. Since June 2024, Prof. Barbara Deml has been a director at the FZI research division Intelligent Systems and Production Engineering.

How should work systems be designed to be technically functional, economically efficient, and human-centered? Barbara Deml investigates how people process information, make decisions, and perform motor and cognitive tasks in technical environments. She studies human work behavior and mental processes in control rooms and adaptive learning environments, as well as in the context of learning systems and collaboration with robots.