Helga Nowotny
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Helga Nowotny (born 9 August 1937) is Vice President of ERC Scientific Council and has been Professor for Social Studies of Science at ETH Zurich since 1996. From 1998 on she was also Director of the Collegium Helveticum. She has been founding director of the post-graduate fellowship programme based at ETH “Society in science: the Branco Weiss Fellowship” until 2004, when she returned to her native Vienna. She is now a Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Wien. She received her doctorate in law at the University of Vienna and her Ph. D. in sociology at Columbia University, New York. She has held teaching and research positions at the Institute of Advanced Study in Vienna, King’s College, Cambridge, UK, the University of Bielefeld, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1981-1982 and 2003-2004 she was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and from 1992-1999 Permanent Fellow at Collegium Budapest/Institute of Advanced Study. Before moving to ETH Zurich, she has been Professor and Head of the newly founded Institute for Theory and Social Studies of Science of the University of Vienna.
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[edit] Research and Books
Her research interests have moved from macrosociology and its methodology (her Ph. D. thesis) to social studies of science and technology (STS). Her work includes topics such as scientific controversies and technological risks, social time, coping with uncertainty, self-organization in science and gender relations in science. These topics became the focus of her work in the 80s, resulting in major monographies, co- edited and edited books and numerous articles. The book Eigenzeit (1987) has been translated into several languages and between 1992 and 1995 Helga Nowotny has been President of the International Society for the Study of Time. From the 90s onwards and equipped with a more secure institutional base, she was able to focus her research activities on a number of new topics in social studies of science and technology such as scientific breakthrough discoveries (together with Ulrike Felt) and on the changing relationship between science and society. Together with Michael Gibbon and Peter Scott she is the author of Re-Thinking Science (2001), a sequel to the influential New Production of Knowledge (1994). Her latest works include an edited book on Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation(2006) and her monograph on Insatiable curiosity: Innovation in a fragile future, which was published in German in 2005, in Italian in 2006 and will be published in English by MIT Press. She is also co-author of The Public Nature of Science Under Assault (2005). Together with molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa she is currently working on a book project that traces the impact of the life sciences on society and the simultaneous re-definition of two of the key concepts in these domains: the gene and the individual.
[edit] Research policy
Besides her teaching and research activities, both at universities and non-university research institutions, Helga Nowotny has been intensely engaged in research policy. From 1985-1992 she was Chairperson of the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation. She has been chair or member of the scientific advisory boards of many research institutions and policy-related committees throughout Europe. Currently, she is Chair of the International Advisory Board of the University of Vienna. From 2001 until early 2006 she was Chair of EURAB, the European Research Advisory Board of the European Commission. She is currently Vice President of the ERC Scientific Council, which has been established to fund frontier research at EU level based on the sole criteria of scientific excellence and pan-European competition.
[edit] Awards and Prices
Helga Nowotny is a Member of Academia Europaea since 1989 and Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Among other honours she has been awarded the J.D. Bernal Prize for her life-long achievements in social studies of science.
