Mathias Unberath

I build the future of physical AI for healthcare – intelligent systems that perceive, reason, and act alongside people.

As the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and co-founder and CTO of Semaphor Surgical, I advance this vision in both academia and industry. My research pushes the boundaries of medical computer vision, machine learning, and human–computer interaction; my company turns those breakthroughs into medtech products.

At Hopkins, I lead the ARCADE Lab (Advanced Robotics and Computationally AugmenteD Environments), where my multidisciplinary team invents human-centered AI systems – embodied in technologies such as mixed reality and robotics – that make healthcare smarter, safer, and more accessible. I serve as Research Director for Interactive and Embodied AI in the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, am a core member of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, and hold secondary appointments in the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing.

Through Semaphor Surgical, a venture-backed start-up I co-founded, I am defining the frontier of procedural AI and building the infrastructure to ship it.

I earned my PhD summa cum laude in Computer Science from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2017, following studies in Physics and Optical Technologies at FAU, a research stint at the University of Eastern Finland as an ERASMUS scholar, and a fellowship at Stanford University as a DAAD fellow. I have authored more than 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles, received more than 20 international best-paper awards, and have been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, the NIH NIBIB Trailblazer Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award.