International Keynote speakers

Helga Nowotny

Helga Nowotny is Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and a founding member of the European Research Council (ERC).

In 2007 she was elected ERC Vice President and in March 2010 succeeded Fotis Kafatos as President of the ERC. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, NY and a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Vienna.

Her current host institution is the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). Helga Nowotny is a member of many international Advisory Boards and selection committees.

She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and long standing member the Academia Europaea and recipient of several prizes and awards. Helga Nowotny has published more than 300 articles in scientific journals. Her latest book publications include Naked Genes, Reinventing the human in the molecular age, (with Giuseppe Testa), MIT Press, 2011, Insatiable Curiosity, Innovation in a Fragile Future, MIT Press, 2008, and Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation (ed.), New York and London, 2006.

Steve Rayner

Steve Rayner is James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at Oxford University’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, from where he also co-directs the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities and the Oxford Geoengineering Programme. He is also Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Society at the University of Copenhagen and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental NGO based in California’s Bay Area. He previously held senior research positions in two US National Laboratories and has taught at leading US universities.

He has served on various US, UK, and international bodies addressing science, technology and the environment, including Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Royal Society’s Working Group on Climate Geoengineering. Until 2008 he also directed the national Science in Society Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council. He was included in the 2008 Smart List by Wired Magazine as ‘one of the 15 people the next US President should listen to’.

Philip Mirowski

Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science, and Fellow of the Reilly Center, University of Notre Dame. He is author of, among others, Machine Dreams (2002), The Effortless Economy of Science? (2004), More Heat than Light (1989), and ScienceMart: privatizing American science (2011). He is editor of Agreement on Demand (2006) and The Road from Mont Pèlerin: the making of the neoliberal thought collective (2009), among other works. Outside of work on the history and analysis of the commercialization of science, he is also working on a computational complexity approach to the crisis, and a new book on the failure of self-conceived progressive economics to resist the neoliberal retrenchment after the Great Recession. He was awarded the Ludwig Fleck Prize from 4S in 2006, and has been visiting professor at Yale, Oxford, NYU, Paris, and the University of Amsterdam.

Roger A. Pielke, Jr.

Roger A. Pielke, Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES, Roger served as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research from 2001-2007. Roger's research focuses on the intersection of science and technology and decision making. In 2006 Roger received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Before joining the University of Colorado, from 1993-2001 Roger was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Roger is a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute. He is also author, co-author or co-editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His most recent book is The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell you About Global Warming (September, 2010).

Brian Wynne

Brian Wynne is Professor of Science Studies and since October 2002 co-principal investigator of the UK ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Cesagen, Lancaster University. He resigned the Associate-Directorship in October 2010. His degrees are in Natural Sciences (Materials Science, 1st class), Cambridge University, 1968; PhD, Materials Science, Cambridge University, 1971; M.Phil, Sociology of Science, Edinburgh University, 1977.

Since retraining from materials science research to sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) at Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh ‘strong programme’ in SSK, Brian diverged from the predominant focus on laboratory science studies, to address scientific knowledge in public arenas with this perspective. His first book, Rationality and Ritual (1982) was an original case-study of this kind, based upon his central participation in and ethnographic observation of the 1977 Windscale Public Inquiry into the controversial spent nuclear fuels THOR reprocessing plant. This was described as ‘brilliant’ by US science policy guru, and godfather of US light-water nuclear reactor programme, Alvin Weinberg. With a new update chapter, it was republished by Earthscan in December 2010.

Since that first book Brian has developed his science and technology studies interests largely through analysis of public issues and knowledges defined as ‘risk issues’ examining the prevailing scientific knowledges for their unnoticed or unacknowledged normative dimensions, and thereby attempting to place such natural knowledges as putative public authority, into their cultural-historical context. Much of this work has also meant offering interpretations of public ‘risk’ concerns and meanings which are relational (eg, about trust, as distinct from calculation of physical-biological harm), and which also challenge the institutional authorisations of science to be more reflexive and accountable as to their own relational-normative presumptions. Brian has developed and published work of this kind in many international peer-reviewed articles and several books, as well as playing a role in science and policy in the UK, EU, and globally. He has been an invited keynote speaker at academic and policy conferences all over the world including Australia and New Zealand, China, Japan, Colombia, and the US and Canada. In 2011 he was awarded the J.D.Bernal Prize, of The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) for distinguished contributions to his field.