Helga Nowotny

Nowotny at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2013

Helga Nowotny (born 1937^[1])is Professor emeritus of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. From 1998 on she was also Director of its 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 was President of the European Research Council from March 2010 until December 2013. 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.

Research and publications

Her research interests have moved from macrosociology and its methodology (her Ph. D. thesis) to social studies of science and technology (STS). Her work in the 70s and 80s includes topics such as scientific controversies and technological risks, social time, coping with uncertainty, self-organization in science and gender relations in science, resulting in major monographs, 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 she focused her research activities on new topics in social studies of science and technology. She conducted an empirical study on the discovery of high-superconductivitity research and its impact on research policy (with Ulrike Felt) and increasingly on the changing relationship between science and society.

Research policy

Next to her teaching and research activities, carried out at several universities and research institutions in Europe, Helga Nowotny has always been intensely engaged in research policy. From 1985-1992 she was Chair of the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation. She has been chair and member of the scientific advisory boards of numerous 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, which has been established to fund frontier research at EU level based on the sole criteria of scientific excellence and pan-European competition.

Awards and Prizes

Helga Nowotny is a Member of Academia Europaea and Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2006. Among other honours she has been awarded the J.D. Bernal Prize for her lifelong achievements in social studies of science.

Selected biblography

Books

• Nowotny, Helga; Mendelsohn, Everett (1984). Nineteen eighty-four: science between utopia and dystopia. Dordrecht Boston Hingham, Massachusetts: D. Reidel Publishg Co. ISBN 9789027717214. 
• Nowotny, Helga et al. (1994). The new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. ISBN 9780803977945.  CS1 maint: Explicit use of et al. (link)
• Nowotny; Taschwer, Klaus (1996). The sociology of the sciences. Cheltenham, UK Brookfield, Vermont, US: E. Elgar. ISBN 9781852789114.  Pdf of book contents.
• Nowotny, Helga; Scott, Peter; Gibbons, Michael (2001). Re-thinking science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ISBN 9780745626086. 
• Nowotny, Helga (2005). The public nature of science under assault politics, markets, science and the law. Berlin New York: Springer. ISBN 9783540257912. 
• Nowotny, Helga (2006). Cultures of technology and the quest for innovation. New York, New York: Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781845451172.  Conference details: Cultures of technology and the quest for innovation, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut (KWI) in Essen, Germany, April 2003.
• Nowotny, Helga (2008). Insatiable curiosity: innovation in a fragile future. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9781435654976. 
• Nowotny, Helga; Testa, Giuseppe (2010). Naked genes: reinventing the human in the molecular age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262014939. 

Journal articles

• Nowotny, Helga (September 1992). "Time and social theory: towards a social theory of time". Time & Society (Sage) 1 (3): 421–454. doi:10.1177/0961463X92001003006. 
• Nowotny, Helga (October 1993). "Socially distributed knowledge: five spaces for science to meet the public". Public Understanding of Science (Sage) 2 (4): 307–319. doi:10.1088/0963-6625/2/4/002. 
• Nowotny, Helga (May 1999). "The place of people in our knowledge". European Review (Cambridge Journals) 7 (2): 247–262. doi:10.1017/S1062798700004026. 
• Nowotny, Helga (February 2000). "Transgressive competence: the narrative of expertise". European Journal of Social Theory (Sage) 3 (1): 5–21. doi:10.1177/136843100003001001. 
• Nowotny, Helga (June 2003). "Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge". Science and Public Policy (Oxford Journals) 30 (3): 151–156. 
• Nowotny, Helga (October 2005). "The increase of complexity and its reduction: emergent interfaces between the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences". Theory, Culture & Society (Sage) 22 (5): 15–31. doi:10.1177/02632764050571896. 

References

External links

• Personal homepage
• ERC homepage
• Works by or about Helga Nowotny in libraries (WorldCat catalog)