Organs
of the Association
Board, Managing Director, General Assembly and Commission
The Board
The Board is responsible for leading the Association OeAWI; it has six members with voting rights.
The Chair of the Board is traditionally the President of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Other members are representatives of Universities Austria (uniko), the Academy of Sciences (OeAW), the Austrian Institute
of Technology (AIT), the University of Vienna, and the Medical University Innsbruck.
The Board’s term of office lasts two years. Board members may be re-elected multiple times.
Board members
Prof. Dr.
Klement Tockner
Chair ÖAWI and President of the FWF
Prof. Dr. Klement Tockner is president of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and professor for Aquatic Ecology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2007 and 2016 he was director of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) in Berlin. He is a globally-recognized scientist on freshwater biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem management and has published more than 250 scientific papers. He has successfully managed large inter- and transdisciplinary projects and is member of several scientific committees and international advisory boards. He is elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina. He became Chairman of the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity (OeAWI) in October 2017.
Prof. Helmut Denk
Austrian Academy of Sciences – Vienna/Austria
Helmut Denk holds an MD degree after completing his studies at the University of Vienna Medical School in 1964 and is also Fellow of the Royal College of Pathology (FRCPath). His main research interests focus on Gastrointestinal and Molecular Pathology. His scientific career included the positions of an assistant in Experimental Pathology, Internal Medicine and Docent and Professor of Pathology at the University of Vienna. From1969 – 1971 he was working as NIH- Research Fellow at the Department of Pathology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, USA, and from 1974-1975 as Visiting Scientist (Fulbright Fellow) at the Department of Pharmacology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, USA. From 1983-2008 he was Professor of Pathology and Chairman of the Department of Pathology at the University of Graz Medical School (later Medical University of Graz). Since then he is Professor emeritus. From 2009-2013 he was elected President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna).
IST Austria
Dr. Verena Seiboth
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Klosterneuburg – Austria
Verena Seiboth is Research Ethics Officer and Research Integrity Officer at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria) in Klosterneuburg. She is conducting workshops on these topics, consulting scientists at the institute, and she is responsible for evaluation and monitoring processes on research ethics. In addition, she is a member of the Ethics Committee at IST Austria. Her other functions at IST Austria include coordination of recruiting and evaluation processes of faculty in the fields of physics and chemistry.
Until 2015, she was a group leader and senior scientist at the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), where she also obtained a habilitation in the field of Biochemistry. She was Editorial Board member of international journals such as Applied and Environmental Microbiology, and Fungal Genetics and Biology, and her international research experience included stays at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the Université Aix-Marseilles in France.
Prof. Sabine Seidler
Universities Austria
Born 1961 in Sangerhausen (Germany)
Married with two children
Professional Experience
11/2019 Member of the Nomination Advisory Board of the B&C Private Foundation
07/2019 –07/2020 President of TU Austria
06/2018 Presidential Council Member at Austrian Standards
01/2018 Chair of the Board of Trustees, Natural History Museum Vienna
12/2016 –12/2017 Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees, Natural History Museum Vienna
05/2016 Member of the Management Board at the Austrian Trade Association
06/2014 Member of the Supervisory Board, Helmholtz-Zentrums Berlin
05/2012 First Female Member of the Supervisory Board at AMAG
10/2011 Rector at TU Wien
10/2007–09/2011 Vice Rector for Research at TU Wien
02/2001 –09/2007 Head of the Institute of Materials Science and Technology at TU Wien
05/1997 Completed post-doctoral qualification (habilitation) in Materials Science
09/1996 Full Professor of Non-metallic Materials at the
Faculty of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, TU Wien
01/1993 –12/1994 Awarded DFG Grant for Post-Doctoral Abilitation
10/1991 –12/1994 Visiting Scientistat at Ruhr-University Bochum,
Institute of Experimental Mechanics
05/1989 –08/1996 Scientific employee at Martin-Luther-University Halle Wittenberg
11/1989 Completed Doctorate
03/1984–05/1989 Scientific employee at Technical University Merseburg
Member of Scientific Boards (current)
Vienna Economic Council
Fraunhofer Austria Research
Member of Scientific Committees, Associations, Networks
The Association of German Engineers, VDI
European Structural Integrity Society, ESIS
German Association for Materials Research and Testing, DVM
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Materialkunde, DGM
Society of Plastic Engineers, SPE
Austrian Physical Society, OEPG
Austrian Society for Biomedical Engineering, ÖGBMT
Awards and Honors
11/2019 Entry in the Golden Book of the City of Sangerhausen (Germany)
06/2018 Awarded the Honorary doctoray (Dr.-Ing. h.c.) by TU Dresden
10/2014 Awarded the H.F. Mark-Medal
04/2016 Look Business Award
1982 First Prize at the VIII. International Students Congress in Sofia, Bulgaria
Main Research Areas
Structural-Properties and Correlations in Polymers
Fracture Mechanics
Polymer Testing
Education
1984 Completed Thesis
1982–1984 Director of the School of the Facilitated Impact Testing
1979–1984 Studied Materials Science at the Technical University of Merseburg
Prof.
Jean-Robert Tyran
University of Vienna/Austria
Jean-Robert Tyran is Vice-Rector for Research and International Affairs at the University of Vienna. He is professor of public economics at the University of Vienna, director of the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics and a member of various editorial boards (Experimental Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, Journal of the Economic Science Association, Journal of Experimental Political Science), and professional Boards (Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics, German Economic Association). Before his appointment as Vice-Rector he was active as Dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics.
He is a research fellow at various institutions (CEPR, London; EPRU, U Copenhagen) and has held numerous visiting positions (Harvard Kennedy School, London School of Economics, among others). He is also part-time Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Before moving to Vienna in September 2010, he was at University of Copenhagen since 2004, and at University of St. Gallen
since 1997. He has earned his PhD in economics at the University of Zurich in 1997.
Managing Director
The Managing Director is responsible for the management of the Administrative Office.
The Rules of Procedure determine what duties of the Board shall be assigned to the Managing Director and what the scope of the director’s power of
representation shall be. All tasks are closely coordinated with the Board.
Managing Director
Dr. Nicole Foeger
Managing Director of the OeAWI
Nicole Foeger holds a PhD degree in biochemistry and worked as a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna, the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg (Germany) and at the University of Basel (Switzerland). Later on she also obtained a postgraduate education in Public Relations.
Since 2010 she is Head of the Administrative Office of the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity and involved in all RI activities on the national level: giving trainings for researchers, advising in all matters of RI and supporting the independent national commission that offers a neutral and objective forum to be able to investigate cases of (alleged) research misconduct.
From April 2012 until October 2018 Nicole Foeger was the elected Chair of the European Network of Research Integrity Offices (ENRIO). She is involved in several European initiatives and EU-projects on research integrity as project partner or member of the advisory board. Since May 2018 she is also member of the World Conference on Research Integrity Foundation (WCRIF).
The General Assembly
The General Assembly represents the “Assembly of Members” as defined in the Austrian Associations Act of 2002. An ordinary General Assembly is convened at least once a year. The General Assembly constitutes a quorum when at least half of the votes of full members are represented.
Essential duties of the General Assembly include the appointment and dismissal of board members, the managing director and auditors, and receipt and
approval of the Association’s report and statement of accounts in cooperation with the auditors. Furthermore, the General Assembly has the right to determine the admission or exclusion of members and can set the membership fees.
The specific amount of the membership fee and the number of allocated votes correlate to the size of the institution concerned.
The Commission
The OeAWI provides a neutral and factual platform for investigating cases of (alleged) research misconduct thoroughly and objectively. The Commission for Research Integrity is responsible for professionally investigating such cases in Austria, evaluating the severity of each violation and recommending follow-up measures.
It constitutes an independent body and consists of renowned researchers in different fields of expertise, mainly from abroad.
The Commission has neither an arbitrary nor an adjudicative function. The members of the Commission are appointed by the General Assembly for a term of two years.
Commission members may be re-appointed twice.
Members of the Commission
Humanities
Prof. Philipp Theisohn
Chair of the Commission
Department of German Studies, University of Zurich
Zurich – Switzerland
Philipp Theisohn studied German literature and philosophy in Tübingen and Zurich. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2004, he worked as a lecturer at the German department in Tübingen, before moving to ETH Zurich in 2008. In 2013 he obtained SNSF-professorship at the German department at the University of Zurich, since 2019 he has been professor for Modern German Literature at the University of Zurich.
Selected publications: Die Urbarkeit der Zeichen. Zionismus und Literatur – eine andere Poetik der Moderne. Stuttgart / Weimar 2005; Plagiat. Eine unoriginelle Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart 2009; Literarisches Eigentum. Zur Ethik geistiger Arbeit im digitalen Zeitalter. Stuttgart 2012; Die Zukunft der Dichtung. Geschichte des literarischen Orakels 1450-2050. München 2012.
Law
Alexandra Kemmerer
Deputy Chair of the Commission
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law
Heidelberg and Berlin – Germany
Alexandra Kemmerer is Senior Research Fellow and academic coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, whose Berlin office she has headed since 2015. She studied law in Würzburg and Galway and served as a law clerk (Rechtsreferendar) in Würzburg, New York and Speyer, held academic positions in Würzburg and Leipzig and was a visiting research scholar at, inter alia, the European University Institute and the University of Michigan Law School. As academic coordinator of Recht im Kontext at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2010-2014), she served also as co-director of the project’s transregional and interdisciplinary research program Rechtskulturen: Confrontations beyond Comparison, in cooperation with Humboldt University Law School, where she also taught. At Humboldt, she also established the collaborative research and blog project Verfassungsblog: Prospects of Scientific Communication in Legal Scholarship. She is co-editor of the series “Recht im Kontext” and the journal “Recht und Zugang”, member of the editorial board of the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte and of the advisory boards of German Law Journal (of which she was co-editor from 2004 – 2014) and Völkerrechtsblog. As an author and journalist, Alexandra Kemmerer regularly publishes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Merkur and other media. Her research interests include international law, European public law, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, context(s) and histories of law, and the media theory and communicative praxis of law. Her current focus is on histories of the legal integration of Europe and international law, and interrelations between biography, doctrine, and theory.
Social Sciences
Prof. Andreas Diekmann
Member of the Commission
Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland
Andreas Diekmann is Professor em. of Sociology at the ETH Zurich (2003 – 2016) and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (2017 – 2018). He earned a doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg in 1979 (Dr. rer. pol.), and received the “venia legendi” (Dr. rer. pol. habil.) from the University of Munich (1987). His areas of research are social cooperation and experimental game theory, environmental and population sociology, and methods of empirical social research. He served as a member of the Humboldt professor price committee and is chairman and senator of the section “Economics and Empirical Social Sciences” of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He is also a fellow of the European Academy of Sociology and co-editor and board member of several professional journals and research institutions. Present research activities focus on experimental research on social norms and energy consumption, an analysis of the environmental burden of metropolitan areas with geo-referenced panel data (supported by grants of the Swiss National Science Foundation) and experimental research on reputation formation and social cooperation.
Austrian Law
Prof. Nikolaus Forgó
Member of the Commission
Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law
University of Vienna – Austria
Nikolaus Forgó is professor of IT and IP Law at the University of Vienna and heads the Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law.
After his law studies in Vienna and Paris, he was university assistant at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna and its IT representative from 1990 to 2000. This is where he also founded the Postgraduate Program for Information- and Media Law in 1998 and is head of the program ever since.
During his time as professor for IT-Law and Legal Informatics at Leibniz University Hannover from 2000 to 2017, he also headed the university´s Institute for Legal Informatics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, he was director of the Research Center L3s and data protection officer of Leibniz University Hannover, where he also was in the position of chief information officer from 2015 to 2017.
He is a member of the Digitalisation Council of Lower Saxony since March 2017 and an expert member of the Data Protection Council of the Republic of Austria since July 2018. Since October 2017, he is professor of IT and IP Law at the University of Vienna, Department of Innovation and Digitalisation in Law.
Nikolaus Forgó conducts extensive dogmatic and third-party funded research for European, German and Austrian clients regarding questions of IT law, in particular data protection and data security law. His activities also include evaluation and consulting i.a. for the European Commission, the German Research Foundation, the German Ethics Council as well as various German and Austrian ministries.
Life Sciences
Prof. Susanne Modrow
Member of the Commission
Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene Regensburg
Regensburg – Germany
Medical Sciences
Prof. Frits Rosendaal
Member of the Commission
Department of Clinical Epidemiology
Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) – The Netherlands
Frits Rosendaal is professor and chair of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology at the Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands. He studied medicine in Rotterdam (1985), and obtained his PhD at Leiden University on a thesis on haemophilia (1989, Hemophilia, the best of times, the worst of times).
He has a long standing track record in research in thrombosis and haemostasis, with over 1000 publications in leading biomedical journals. He designed several large epidemiological studies, such as LETS and MEGA, that were instrumental in the identification of a series of risk factors for thrombosis, which ranged from genetic factors, such as factor V Leiden, to environmental ones, particularly related to drug safety, such as specific brands of oral contraceptives. In the field of anticoagulant treatment he developed the method used to estimate the time in therapeutic range (TTR, “Rosendaal method”). In the field of haemophilia, he oversees the Haemophilia in the Netherlands (HiN) national projects, and is involved in studies of inhibitor development, again in the context of drug safety. More recently he has focused on the relation of excess and ectopic fat with cardiometabolic disease, for which he initiated the NEO-study, including 6700 individuals.
He is recipient of the Spinoza award, which is the highest scientific prize in The Netherlands, is elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands, and of the German Academy Leopoldina. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris Descartes. He is member of the Council of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), member of the LERU Policy Group on Research Integrity, and co-chairman of the Leiden University Committee on Scientific Integrity. For many years (2002-2018) he was member of the Council of the International Society of Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH), which he also chaired. In 2016, he founded the European Congress on Thrombosis and Haemostasis.
Economic Sciences
Prof.
Kerstin Schneider
Member of the Commission
WIB – Wuppertal Research Institute for the Economics of Education
University of Wuppertal
Wuppertal – Germany
Kerstin Schneider holds a PhD in economics and worked as an assistant professor (Wissenschaftliche Assistentin) at the TU Dortmund, where she also completed her Habilitation. Since 2004 she is a chaired professor for public economics and business taxation at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and research fellow of CESifo. Since 2014 she also heads the WIB (Wuppertal Research Institute for the Economics of Education), a research institute at the Universität Wuppertal which is active in interdisciplinary research and policy consulting. Her research focuses on education economics and taxation. She serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Leibniz Research Institutes DIW (Berlin), RWI (Essen) and LIfBi (Bamberg). From 2013-2018 she was a member of the Ethics Committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik. She joined the OeAWI in 2018.
Natural and Technical Sciences
Prof. Dr. Joachim Heberle
Member of the Commission
Department of Physics, Experimental Molecular Biophysics
Freie Universität Berlin – Germany
Joachim Heberle is full professor of experimental molecular biophysics at the physics department of the Freie Universität Berlin. He started studying chemistry at the University of Stuttgart and graduated in physical chemistry in 1988 at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Three years later he received a PhD in biophysics from the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1991 to 1993 he was a PostDoc at the Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin (now HZB). In 1993 he set up a young investigators group at the Research Center in Jülich (now HZJ). During this time, he obtained his habilitation in biophysical chemistry (1998) from the Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf. In 2005, he became professor for that area of research at the department of chemistry at the University of Bielefeld. Since 2009 he is W3 professor at Freie Universität Berlin.
Prof. Heberle was a guest scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson (1991), Göteborg University (1995), Changchun University, China (2009) and the Technical University of Nagoya, Japan (2015–2016).
The focus of Heberle´s research is on biophysics, particularly on the development and application of vibrational spectroscopic methods to investigate the function of membrane proteins. Heberle is the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center 1078 “Protonation Dynamics in Protein Function”, board member of the Cluster of Excellence “UniSysCat” and associate editor of “Chemical Reviews”. From 2014–2021 Heberle was resp. is member of the Council “Ombudsman for Science” in Germany and therefore well acquainted with the subject of scientific integrity.