Gabriele Kern-Isberner is a (recently retired) Professor for Information Engineering at the department of computer science at the TU Dortmund. She received her doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Dortmund, and her habilitation degree and venia legendi in computer science from the FernUniversitaet in Hagen.

Her scientific work focuses on qualitative and quantitative approaches to knowledge representation such as default and non-monotonic logics, uncertain reasoning, belief revision, and argumentation. Her research interests include in particular the development of methods that help integrate approaches from different fields, such as the combination of first-order logic and probabilities, or building bridges between default reasoning, belief revision, and learning. Recently, she has been focussing on cognitive logics, i.e., formal logic-based approaches to reasoning that can model human reasoning even if it is in obvious conflict to classical logics. As part of this work, she developed explanation models to reverse-engineer human reasoning behaviour.

She has been involved in the organization of major conferences in AI. In particular, she was co-PC-chair of KR 2022 and General Chair of KR 2023. Currently, she is President-Elect of the KR Corporate Organization, KR Inc.