About

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich and former President of the European Research Council. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, New York, and a doctorate in jurisprudence, University of Vienna. She has held teaching and research positions at universities and research institutions in several countries in Europe and has been actively engaged in research and innovation policy at European and international level during her entire professional career. Among other, she is currently a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin; and Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. She has received numerous awards such as the rarely awarded Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea, the Leibniz-Medaille of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the British Academy President’s Medal. Helga Nowotny is the recipient of many honorary doctorates, among them from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. 

She has published widely in science and technology studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest publications include “The Cunning of Uncertainty” (2015), “An Orderly Mess” (2017) and „In AI we trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms“ (2021).