Ott, Tabea

My research focuses on areas where digital technologies shape people's lives and decision-making situations. In everyday life, this concerns, for example, the use of digital health applications, AI-supported diagnostics, or data-based decision-making processes in nursing and medicine. My work aims to raise awareness of the associated issues of justice, participation, autonomy, and vulnerability, and to provide guidance.

My research is situated in the field of concrete ethics from a fundamental theological perspective. Beyond the specific contexts of medicine and social welfare, I also examine fundamental structures of justification for human dignity, focusing in particular on narrative-anamnetic arguments in philosophy and theology. Methodologically, I draw on abductive procedures, hermeneutic and historical approaches, and qualitative methods, among others.

• Medical ethics and the ethics of artificial intelligence
• Ethics of visibility and ethics of attention
• Theories of recognition
• Vulnerability & care
• Intersectional feminist theology and theory
• Ethics and science communication
• Diaconal studies 

• 2014–2021 Studies of Protestant Theology, German Language and Literature, and Education at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai (Romania), the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
• 2021 B.A. and First State Examination
• 2021–2025 Research assistant in the Collaborative Research Centre 1483 EmpkinS Empatho-Kinaesthetic Sensor Technology – Sensor Techniques and Data Analysis Methods for Empatho-Kinaesthetic Modelling and Condition Monitoring in the Ethics sub-project at the Chair of Systematic Theology II (Ethics), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
• 2023 Visiting scholar at UNSW Sydney at the Centre for Social Research in Health
• 2025 Doctorate in Theology (Systematic Theology/Ethics), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
• 2025 Postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Systematic Theology II (Ethics), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg
• since 2025 Associate Researcher in the ‘Digital Religion(s)’ cluster at the University of Zurich
• since 2026 Deputy Director of the Department for Ethics and Law in Medicine (research platform of the University of Vienna and MedUni Vienna)
• since January 2026 Tenure-track professorship for medical ethics and diaconal studies at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Vienna