Christian Essling

Chris is heading the global data unit within EON. Together with his team of data scientists and data engineers he helps all entities within the corporation to use data for automating processes, smartifying products, and accelerating the energy transition. Before that, Chris was the Chief Data Officer at E.ON Germany where he was in charge of the data strategy, aimed at creating a more data-driven culture, and used algorithms to optimize and automate processes for his colleagues and their 14M customers.

Prior to joining E.ON, Chris was Director Analytics at BurdaForward where he built up the Data Science team from scratch, establishing infrastructure, processes and a data-driven innovation culture. While at Burda, his team used data to create a personalized user experience for Germanys largest online news portal with more than 22M users. Chris joined Burda from Alexander Thamm, a Data Science consultancy, where he managed the development and implementation of large scale data projects.

Chris holds a PhD, MBR and masters degree in Economics from the university of Munich. He co-founded (and now serves as chairman of) the Munich Datageeks e.V., one of Europes largest Data Science communities and was listed as one of the Global Top100 Innovators in Data & Analytics in 2020.