Helga Nowotny
Helga Nowotny (born August 9, 1937 in Vienna ) is an internationally recognized science researcher and emerita professor at ETH Zurich . She was a founding member and vice-president of the European Research Council , ERC ( European Research Council) , established in 2007, and its president from 2010 to 2013. She is currently Chair of the ERA Council Forum Austria and a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development .
Life
Helga Nowotny grew up in Vienna and spent a year in high school with the American Field Service in West De Pere, Wisconsin . She graduated with distinction and completed her law studies at the University of Vienna in four years with a Dr. iur. She then was an assistant professor at the Institute of Criminology before moving to New York and doing her Ph.D. at Columbia University with Paul F. Lazarsfeld. in sociology. Back in Vienna, she headed the Sociology Department at the Institute for Advanced Studies. This was followed by a sabbatical at King's College Cambridge and teaching and habilitation in sociology with a focus on science research at Bielefeld University . She was the founding director of the European Center in Vienna before joining the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin as a first-year fellow in 1981/82 . During this time she had to do her habilitation again at the University of Vienna.
Her further teaching and research activities took her several times to the Science Center Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Ecole in Paris . From 1992 to 1999 she was a Permanent Fellow at the Collegium Budapest / Institute of Advanced Study . Before her appointment at ETH Zurich in 1995, Helga Nowotny was a professor and head of the Institute for Philosophy of Science and Science Research at the University of Vienna, which was newly founded in 1986. At the ETH Zurich, in addition to her professorship in the philosophy of science and science research, she headed the interdisciplinary Collegium Helveticum . After her retirement in 2002, she was founding director of the Branco Weiss Fellowship program society-in-science at ETH Zurich until 2004 . Helga Nowotny was a lecturer at the University of Lüneburg , where she was awarded the title of honorary doctorate at the Dies Academicus in 2014 .
For 2018 Nowotny was awarded the Leibniz Medal of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences . She is an elected member of several other scientific academies and societies.
Research and publications
Helga Nowotny's research interests soon led her from the methods of macro-sociology , which she developed in her Ph.D. Thesis on Science and Technology Studies (STS). One of her teachers at Columbia University was Robert K. Merton , internationally recognized as the founder of the sociology of science . During her sabbatical at King's College, Cambridge, she taught “The sociology of science, learning and belief”. For many years she was co-editor of the Yearbook in the Sociology of the Sciences . Her work in the 1970s and 1980s focused on topics such as scientific controversy and technological risks; scientific utopias and dystopias; social movements and science; as well as gender relations in the sciences. They found their expression in publications such as Nuclear Energy - Danger or Necessity (1979); How masculine is science (with Karin Hausen, 1986) It is so. It could also be different (1999) as well as in numerous articles in the Yearbook in the Sociology of the Sciences and articles in specialist journals. For many years she dealt with the subject of time. Helga Nowotny's book Eigenzeit (1987) was translated into several languages and received with the book Eigenzeit. Revisited (2016) a sequel. Helga Nowotny has been a member of the International Society for the Study of Time for many years, of which she was president from 1992 to 1995.
In the 1990s she expanded her subjects in science research. Together with Ulrike Felt, she examined the occurrence of scientific breakthroughs and their consequences in research funding After the Breakthrough. The emergence of high-temperature superconductivity as a research field (1997). Increasingly, the changing relationships between science and society came to the fore. Together with Michael Gibbons and Peter Scott, she is the lead author of Re-Thinking Science (2001), German title Wissenschaft rethinking: Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft in ein Zeitalter der Uncertainty (2004), a continuation of the influential book The New Production of Knowledge (1994) in Mode 2 was introduced as a relatively new phenomenon of changing knowledge production. Helga Nowotny's recent publications include Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation (2006) and, as a co-author, The Public Nature of Science under Assault (2005).
Your monograph Insatiable Curiosity. Innovation in a Fragile Future (German 2005; Italian 2006; English 2008 at MIT Press) deals with the tension between basic research and innovation in the face of a fragile future. Together with the epigenetic Giuseppe Testa, she published The Glass Genes in 2009 . The Invention of the Individual in the Molecular Age , published in English by MIT Press Naked Genes. Reinventing the human in the molecular age (2010). The Italian translation Geni a nudo followed (2012). The most recent book was published in 2015, The Cunning of Uncertainty . It was named one of the five best science books of the year by the Financial Times.
Research policy / research advice
During her entire professional career in teaching and research, Helga Nowotny has been heavily involved in research policy, especially at the European level. From 2001 to 2006 she was Chair of the European Research Advisory Board, which advised the European Commission . From 1985 to 1992 she was Chair of the Standing Committee on Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation . She is still active in numerous scientific advisory bodies in various European countries.
From 2008 to 2014 she was a member and chair of the Holberg Prize Committee , which annually awards the most prestigious international prize in the social sciences and humanities in Bergen , Norway. She is currently u. a. Vice-President of the Board of Trustees for the Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau ; Member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation in Berlin; Member of the board of trustees of the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich ; Member of the Board of Trustees of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Foundation in Paris; Member of the scientific advisory board of the Institut d'études avancées (IEA) de Paris; President of the board of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and chair of the scientific advisory board of the newly founded Complexity Science Hub Vienna . She has recently also been working as a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore .
Web links
- Literature by and about Helga Nowotny in the catalog of the German National Library
- Homepage of Helga Nowotny
- Interview with Helga Nowotny in the NZZ Folio magazine
- Helga Nowotny in the AcademiaNet database of renowned scientists
Individual evidence
- ^ Members: Helga Nowotny. Academia Europaea, accessed January 6, 2020 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Nowotny, Helga |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Austrian sociologist, Vice-President of the ERC Scientific Council |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 9, 1937 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vienna |