Organs of the Association

Board of Directors, Management, General Assembly and Commission

Board

The Board

The Board is responsible for leading the OeAWI and is comprised of 8 voting members

The Chair of the Board is traditionally the President of the Austrian Science Fund with additional board members selected based on the composition of OeAWI members. Board members include representatives from public and private universities, universities of applied sciences, non-university research organisations, and research funders.

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

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Christof Gattringer

Chairman of the Board of ÖAWI and President of the FWF

More info

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Manuela Baccarini

University of Vienna

More info

FH-Prof. Mag. Dr. Elisabeth Haslinger-Baumann

Hochschule Campus Wien

More info

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Janko

Johannes Kepler University Linz

More info

Dr. Marjo Rauhala MSSc.

TU Wien

More info

Priv. Doz. Dr. Verena Seiboth

Institute of Science and Technology Austria

More info

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Sperl

Paracelsus Medical University

More info
The management

The management

The Executive Board is responsible for managing the office.

The rules of procedure shall specify which tasks of the Board of Management shall be delegated to the management and the scope of the

Management’s authority to represent the company. All tasks are closely coordinated with the Executive Board.

Rules of procedure of the management (PDF)

Managing Director

Sabine Chai, Ph.D.

Managing Director of the ÖAWI

More info
General Assembly

The General Assembly

The General Assembly is the general meeting of members in the sense of the Association Act 2002. An ordinary General Assembly takes place at least once a year. It has a quorum if at least half of the votes of the ordinary members are represented.

The main tasks are to make decisions about the appointment or dismissal of the board, the management and the auditors,

and to approve the financial management of the association in cooperation with the auditors. Provisions concerning membership, such as the admission or exclusion of members, or to determine the cost membership, also falls to the General Assembly.

The amount of the membership fee and the number of votes depend on the size of the respective institution.

Commission

The Commission

The OeAWI offers a neutral and fact-oriented platform to objectively investigate cases of (alleged) scientific misconduct. The Commission for Research Integrity is an independent body of international experts. Commission members investigate the seriousness of any (alleged) scientific misconduct and, if necessary, submit proposals for subsequent measures to the relevant authority.

The Commission is neither a decision-making body nor a legally binding organizational unit.

Members of the Commission are appointed for two-year terms by the OeAWI General Assembly based on proposals from the Austrian Science Council. Re-election is possible twice.

Commission Members

Prof. Dr. Regina E. Aebi-Müller

Chair of the Commission
Law

More info

Prof. Dr. Johannes Rincke

Deputy chair of the Commission
Economic Sciences

More info

Prof. Dr. Katrin Auspurg

Social Sciences

More info

Prof. Peter Benz

Development of the Arts

More info

Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó

Austrian Law

More info

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Löwen

Natural and Technical Sciences

More info

Prof. Dr. Frits Rosendaal

Medical Sciences

More info

Prof. Dr. Peter Oefner

Life Sciences

More info

Prof. Dr. Reinold Schmücker

Humanities

More info
Foto Gattringer

Univ.-Prof. Dr.
Christof Gattringer

Chair ÖAWI and President of the FWF

Particle physicist Christof Gattringer was a professor at the University of Graz since 2005 and Vice-Rector for Research and Junior Researchers’ Promotion since 2019. He has conducted research, for example, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and at the University of Washington in Seattle.

 

Management Positions in Science and Academia

 

• President of the Austrian Science Fund FWF (since April 2021)
• Vice Rector for Research and Career Development (October 2019 – May 2021)
• Dean, Faculty of Natural Sciences (2015 – 2019)
• Vice Dean for Research, Faculty of Natural Sciences (2009 – 2015)
• Speaker of an FWF-funded Doctoral College in Particle Physics (2009 – 2019)
• Head of the Theoretical Physics Division, Institute of Physics (2007 – 2009)

 

Academic Appointments

 

• Professor (§ 98) for Theoretical Physics, University of Graz (since 2005)
• Professor (C3) for Theoretical Physics, University of Wuppertal (2004)
• Research Assistant, University of Regensburg (2000 – 2005)
• Senior Research Associate, MIT, Cambridge, USA (1998 – 2000)
• FWF Schrödinger Fellow, UBC, Vancouver, Canada (1996 – 1998)
• PhD Fellow, Max-Planck-Society, MPI Werner-Heisenberg-Institute, Munich (1992 – 1996)
• Visiting Research Scholar, University of Washington, Seattle, USA (January 2013 – July 2013)

 

University Training

 

• Habilitation in Theoretical Physics, University of Graz (2002)
• Dissertation at the MPG Werner-Heisenberg-Institute, Munich (1992 – 1995)
PhD in Physics, University of Graz (May 1995)
• Study of Physics and Mathematics, University of Graz (1986 – 1992)
• Study of Mechanical Engineering, TU Graz (1984 – 1986)

 

Scientific Achievements

 

• Author/Co-Author of 185 scientific publications
• Advanced textbook on Lattice Quantum Field Theory (with C.B. Lang)
• Principal Investigator in more than 20 funded research projects
• More than 130 scientific talks at conferences, workshops and seminars
• Ludwig Boltzmann Award of the Austrian Physical Society
• Regular refereeing for DFG and the Swiss National Funds
• International Advisory Board of the MITP Univ. Mainz and the SIGN conference series
• Advisor of 15 PhD theses and 21 Master- und Diploma-theses

Baccarini_Manuela_Porträt
Fotocredit: © derknopfdruecker.com

Prof.
Manuela Baccarini

University of Vienna / Austria

Manuela Baccarini, Professor of Cell Signalling at the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, serves as Vice-Rector for Research and International Affairs at the University of Vienna since 1 October 2022. Manuela Baccarini was born in Italy and completed her doctoral studies at the Sapienza University of Rome. Following positions at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Hanover, and at the Albert Einstein College of the Yeshiva University in New York, Baccarini joined the Department of Microbiology, Immunobiology and Genetics at the Centre for Molecular Biology of the University of Vienna. From 2007 to 2017 Baccarini held the position of Vice-Dean and assistant director of the Max Perutz Labs. Up until September 2022 Baccarini led the doctoral programme „Vienna BioCenter PhD program“ of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna and was director of the study program „Molecular Biology“ (University of Vienna) and „Molecular Bioscience“ (joint PhD study program University of Vienna/ Medical University of Vienna). Manuela Baccarini is a member of EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Elisabeth Haslinger-Baumann_420x420_watermarked_centered

FH-Prof. Mag. Dr. Elisabeth Haslinger-Baumann

Hochschule Campus Wien

Since 2022, Vice Rector for Research and Development and member of the executive board of Hochschule Campus Wien. Member of the ethics commission of Hochschule Campus Wien.

Between 2014 and 2022, she developed, implemented and managed the Competence Center for Applied Nursing Research at Hochschule Campus Wien, and taught in the Department for Applied Nursing Research. She developed the strategic direction of the research center and conceptualized and led application-focused and interdisciplinary projects in national and international contexts. Her research focuses are in the fields of Active and Assisted Living, Digitalization in health and nursing, as well as Theory-Practice-Transfer. From 1998 to 2013, she was part of the research institute of the Vienna Red Cross (which she led for 1.5 years) where she established nursing research with a focus on evidence-based nursing in mobile and inpatient care.

Haslinger-Baumann studied Philosophy with a focus on ethics as well as Political Science with a focus on social policy, both at the University of Vienna. She holds a Doctorate in Nursing Science with a focus on research applications from UMIT – Private University for health sciences, medical informatics and technology in Hall, Tyrol.

Many years of experience as certified health- and nursing professional in Austria (Vienna) and abroad (Nepal, India, Columbia, Ecuador) Married,
three children.

Priv. Doz.
Dr. Verena Seiboth

Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Klosterneuburg – Austria

Dr. Verena Seiboth is the Head of Postdoctoral and Faculty Affairs at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria. Her responsibilities include overseeing the Ethics Office, which leads and coordinates institutional efforts in Research Integrity, Ethics, and Research Security at ISTA. She studied chemistry in Vienna and gained international research experience with stays in the United States, at the University of Edinburgh (UK), and the Université Aix-Marseille (France). Until 2015, she was a Group Leader at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), where she obtained a habilitation in Biochemistry. Her research focused on carbohydrate-degrading enzymes in filamentous fungi for biotechnological applications and the genetic regulation of those enzyme clusters. Since 2015, she has been working in research management at ISTA, with a focus on responsible research practices and the development and implementation of strategic frameworks and institutional policies to address evolving challenges in the research landscape.

Univ. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Sperl

Paracelsus Medical University

Wolfgang Sperl was rector of Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg from June 2020 to December 2025. Up until June 2021, he headed the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg and was also Head of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Salzburg.

 

Wolfgang Sperl studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck and earned his doctorate there in 1981 “sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae”. From 1981, he undertook medical specialist training in pediatrics at the University Hospital for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Innsbruck, qualifying as medical specialist in 1987. After an Erwin Schrödinger scholarship between 1988 and 1990 at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, he completed his Ph.D. at the University´s Hospital of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1992. In the same year he habilitated at the University Hospital for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in Innsbruck. In 1998, he was appointed “Ao. Univ.-Prof.” at the University of Innsbruck. Since 1996, Sperl has been Head of the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg, and since 2007 Professor of Pediatrics at the University Hospital of Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg. Since 2013 he has been coordinating the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg. Parallel to this, he has been working as medical director of REKIZ, the specialist hospital for children’s neurorehabilitation, since 2010.

 

In 2015 Sperl became scientific director of the “Early Life Care” university course at Paracelsus Medical University and St. Virgil Salzburg.

His research focused on the areas of diagnosis and therapy of mitochondrial encephalomyopathy in children and adolescents, congenital metabolic disorders and prevention of sudden infant death syndrome. Sperl has played a key part in the development of rehabilitation for children and adolescents in Austria, and is head of the department of Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation at the Austrian Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. From 2015 to 2018 he was the president of the ÖGKJ, and has since then been their vice president.

Foto

Sabine Chai, Ph.D.

Managing Director of the OeAWI
Sabine Chai studied Protestant Theology, Chinese Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Vienna as well as Communication at San Diego State University and the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2010 she became Assistant Professor of Communication at Western Kentucky University and continued teaching there until 2020. From 2014 to 2015 she participated in the development and implementation of a training program in implementation science for researchers at icddr,b (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh). 2015 to 2018 she was scientific advisor/editor of the Field Epidemiology Training Program, Bangladesh. After her return to Austria, she built up the Albert Schweitzer Haus Forum, a platform for civil society dialog and adult education for Diakonie Eine Welt and served as managing director and quality management officer of the Association for Protestant Adult Education Institutes in Austria from 2019 to 2022. She joined the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity as managing director in April 2022.
Foto Gattringer

Univ.-Prof. Dr.
Christof Gattringer

Chair ÖAWI and President of the FWF

Particle physicist Christof Gattringer was a professor at the University of Graz since 2005 and Vice-Rector for Research and Junior Researchers’ Promotion since 2019. He has conducted research, for example, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and at the University of Washington in Seattle.

 

Management Positions in Science and Academia

 

• President of the Austrian Science Fund FWF (since April 2021)
• Vice Rector for Research and Career Development (October 2019 – May 2021)
• Dean, Faculty of Natural Sciences (2015 – 2019)
• Vice Dean for Research, Faculty of Natural Sciences (2009 – 2015)
• Speaker of an FWF-funded Doctoral College in Particle Physics (2009 – 2019)
• Head of the Theoretical Physics Division, Institute of Physics (2007 – 2009)

 

Academic Appointments

 

• Professor (§ 98) for Theoretical Physics, University of Graz (since 2005)
• Professor (C3) for Theoretical Physics, University of Wuppertal (2004)
• Research Assistant, University of Regensburg (2000 – 2005)
• Senior Research Associate, MIT, Cambridge, USA (1998 – 2000)
• FWF Schrödinger Fellow, UBC, Vancouver, Canada (1996 – 1998)
• PhD Fellow, Max-Planck-Society, MPI Werner-Heisenberg-Institute, Munich (1992 – 1996)
• Visiting Research Scholar, University of Washington, Seattle, USA (January 2013 – July 2013)

 

University Training

 

• Habilitation in Theoretical Physics, University of Graz (2002)
• Dissertation at the MPG Werner-Heisenberg-Institute, Munich (1992 – 1995)
PhD in Physics, University of Graz (May 1995)
• Study of Physics and Mathematics, University of Graz (1986 – 1992)
• Study of Mechanical Engineering, TU Graz (1984 – 1986)

 

Scientific Achievements

 

• Author/Co-Author of 185 scientific publications
• Advanced textbook on Lattice Quantum Field Theory (with C.B. Lang)
• Principal Investigator in more than 20 funded research projects
• More than 130 scientific talks at conferences, workshops and seminars
• Ludwig Boltzmann Award of the Austrian Physical Society
• Regular refereeing for DFG and the Swiss National Funds
• International Advisory Board of the MITP Univ. Mainz and the SIGN conference series
• Advisor of 15 PhD theses and 21 Master- und Diploma-theses

Baccarini_Manuela_Porträt
Fotocredit: © derknopfdruecker.com

Prof.
Manuela Baccarini

University of Vienna / Austria

Manuela Baccarini, Professor of Cell Signalling at the Max Perutz Labs of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, serves as Vice-Rector for Research and International Affairs at the University of Vienna since 1 October 2022. Manuela Baccarini was born in Italy and completed her doctoral studies at the Sapienza University of Rome. Following positions at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Toxicology and Experimental Medicine in Hanover, and at the Albert Einstein College of the Yeshiva University in New York, Baccarini joined the Department of Microbiology, Immunobiology and Genetics at the Centre for Molecular Biology of the University of Vienna. From 2007 to 2017 Baccarini held the position of Vice-Dean and assistant director of the Max Perutz Labs. Up until September 2022 Baccarini led the doctoral programme „Vienna BioCenter PhD program“ of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna and was director of the study program „Molecular Biology“ (University of Vienna) and „Molecular Bioscience“ (joint PhD study program University of Vienna/ Medical University of Vienna). Manuela Baccarini is a member of EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) and corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Elisabeth Haslinger-Baumann_420x420_watermarked_centered

FH-Prof. Mag. Dr. Elisabeth Haslinger-Baumann

Hochschule Campus Wien

Since 2022, Vice Rector for Research and Development and member of the executive board of Hochschule Campus Wien. Member of the ethics commission of Hochschule Campus Wien.

Between 2014 and 2022, she developed, implemented and managed the Competence Center for Applied Nursing Research at Hochschule Campus Wien, and taught in the Department for Applied Nursing Research. She developed the strategic direction of the research center and conceptualized and led application-focused and interdisciplinary projects in national and international contexts. Her research focuses are in the fields of Active and Assisted Living, Digitalization in health and nursing, as well as Theory-Practice-Transfer. From 1998 to 2013, she was part of the research institute of the Vienna Red Cross (which she led for 1.5 years) where she established nursing research with a focus on evidence-based nursing in mobile and inpatient care.

Haslinger-Baumann studied Philosophy with a focus on ethics as well as Political Science with a focus on social policy, both at the University of Vienna. She holds a Doctorate in Nursing Science with a focus on research applications from UMIT – Private University for health sciences, medical informatics and technology in Hall, Tyrol.

Many years of experience as certified health- and nursing professional in Austria (Vienna) and abroad (Nepal, India, Columbia, Ecuador) Married,
three children.

Priv. Doz.
Dr. Verena Seiboth

Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Klosterneuburg – Austria

Dr. Verena Seiboth is the Head of Postdoctoral and Faculty Affairs at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria. Her responsibilities include overseeing the Ethics Office, which leads and coordinates institutional efforts in Research Integrity, Ethics, and Research Security at ISTA. She studied chemistry in Vienna and gained international research experience with stays in the United States, at the University of Edinburgh (UK), and the Université Aix-Marseille (France). Until 2015, she was a Group Leader at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), where she obtained a habilitation in Biochemistry. Her research focused on carbohydrate-degrading enzymes in filamentous fungi for biotechnological applications and the genetic regulation of those enzyme clusters. Since 2015, she has been working in research management at ISTA, with a focus on responsible research practices and the development and implementation of strategic frameworks and institutional policies to address evolving challenges in the research landscape.

Univ. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Sperl

Paracelsus Medical University

Wolfgang Sperl was rector of Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg from June 2020 to December 2025. Up until June 2021, he headed the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg and was also Head of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Salzburg.

 

Wolfgang Sperl studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck and earned his doctorate there in 1981 “sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae”. From 1981, he undertook medical specialist training in pediatrics at the University Hospital for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine Innsbruck, qualifying as medical specialist in 1987. After an Erwin Schrödinger scholarship between 1988 and 1990 at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, he completed his Ph.D. at the University´s Hospital of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1992. In the same year he habilitated at the University Hospital for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in Innsbruck. In 1998, he was appointed “Ao. Univ.-Prof.” at the University of Innsbruck. Since 1996, Sperl has been Head of the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg, and since 2007 Professor of Pediatrics at the University Hospital of Paracelsus Medical University in Salzburg. Since 2013 he has been coordinating the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at University Hospital Salzburg. Parallel to this, he has been working as medical director of REKIZ, the specialist hospital for children’s neurorehabilitation, since 2010.

 

In 2015 Sperl became scientific director of the “Early Life Care” university course at Paracelsus Medical University and St. Virgil Salzburg.

His research focused on the areas of diagnosis and therapy of mitochondrial encephalomyopathy in children and adolescents, congenital metabolic disorders and prevention of sudden infant death syndrome. Sperl has played a key part in the development of rehabilitation for children and adolescents in Austria, and is head of the department of Child and Adolescent Rehabilitation at the Austrian Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. From 2015 to 2018 he was the president of the ÖGKJ, and has since then been their vice president.

Foto

Sabine Chai, Ph.D.

Managing Director of the OeAWI
Sabine Chai studied Protestant Theology, Chinese Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Vienna as well as Communication at San Diego State University and the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2010 she became Assistant Professor of Communication at Western Kentucky University and continued teaching there until 2020. From 2014 to 2015 she participated in the development and implementation of a training program in implementation science for researchers at icddr,b (International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh). 2015 to 2018 she was scientific advisor/editor of the Field Epidemiology Training Program, Bangladesh. After her return to Austria, she built up the Albert Schweitzer Haus Forum, a platform for civil society dialog and adult education for Diakonie Eine Welt and served as managing director and quality management officer of the Association for Protestant Adult Education Institutes in Austria from 2019 to 2022. She joined the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity as managing director in April 2022.
AM_quadrat
Law

Prof.
Regina E. Aebi-Müller

Deputy Chair of the Commission

Faculty of Law, University of Lucerne – Switzerland Regina E. Aebi-Müller graduated in law from the University of Bern and was admitted to the bar of the Canton of Bern in 1997. This was followed by a doctorate with a focus on family and inheritance law. In 2005, she completed her habilitation on the system of the protection of personality in civil law. Since the same year, she has been a full professor of private law and comparative private law at the University of Lucerne. Her research focuses on medical law, family law, the law of persons (capacity to act, protection of personality, law of associations and foundations) and the law of succession. She has authored numerous publications, partly in the context of externally funded research projects, and is a member of national and international professional societies. Since 2016, she has been co-editor of the renowned «Berner Kommentar». Regina E. Aebi-Müller has been a member of the Central Ethics Committee of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences since June 2017 and a member of the Expert Committee of Alzheimer Switzerland since 2019. She was a Research Councillor at the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2021 and Vice-President of this division from 2017 to 2021. She was also a member and Vice President of the Commission for Scientific Integrity of the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2017 to 2021. Since 2020, Regina E. Aebi-Müller has been Prorector for Personnel and Professorships at the University of Lucerne and, a spart of that position, President of the University Equal Opportunities Commission. Since 2011, she has been an investigator in cases of sexual harassment. From 2007 to 2011, she was Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne.
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) Fachbereich Wirtschaft- und Sozialwissenschaften (WISO) Prof. Dr. Johannes Rincke Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Wirtschaftspolitik 10.11.2022 ©Giulia Iannicelli
Economic Sciences

Prof.
Johannes Rincke

Member of the Commission

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Fachbereich Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften

 

Johannes Rincke is full professor of economics at the department of economics, business and society at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. After studying economics at Free University Berlin, he started his academic career at the Centre for European Economic Research and the University of Mannheim and obtained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Göttingen in 2006. He then joined LMU Munich as a Post Doc. After research stays at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), he became professor of economics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In his research, Johannes Rincke uses experimental methods to answer question in the area of behavioral economics. Among other topics, he has repeatedly investigated under which conditions people tend to behave in accordance to existing rules and norms. Johannes Rincke is acting chairman of the ethic committee at the department of economics, business and society at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Katrin Auspurg_quadrat
Social Sciences

Prof. Dr.
Katrin Auspurg

Member of the Commission

Department of Sociology

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München – Germany

Katrin Auspurg is full professor of sociology with a focus on quantitative methods of empirical social research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). She holds a diploma in social work from the University of Applied Sciences in Munich and a diploma in sociology from the LMU Munich. She received her doctorate in 2010 from the University of Konstanz, in 2014 she was appointed to a professorship at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2015, she was appointed to the LMU Munich.

 

Her research interests include methods of empirical social research (surveys and experiments), labor market and family sociology. In particular, her research focuses on questions of the perception of social inequality and attitudes towards redistribution. She is also interested in careers in science and the extent and conditions of replicability of social science research. Another research focus is on incentive structures and social dilemmas, for example in the field of environmental behavior and in academia. In the area of multifactorial survey experiments, she has published an English-language textbook and several articles on methodological and substantive issues. She has been a commission member at ÖAWI since 2022.

 

Selected Publications:

  • Auspurg, Katrin/Brüderl, Josef (2021): Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
  • Auspurg Katrin/Schneck, Andreas/Hinz, Thomas (2018): Closed Doors Everywhere? A Meta-Analyses of Field Experiments on Ethnic Discrimination in Rental Housing Markets. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45(1), 95-114.
  • Auspurg, Katrin/Hinz, Thomas/Sauer, Carsten (2017): Why Should Women Get Less? Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap from Multifactorial Survey Experiments. American Sociological Review 82 (1), 179-210.
  • Auspurg, Katrin/Hinz, Thomas/Schneck, Andreas (2014): Ausmaß und Risikofaktoren des Publication Bias in der deutschen Soziologie. [Prevalence and Risk-Factors of Publication Bias in German Sociology.] Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 66 (4), 549-573.
DominiqueWollniokfull


Development of the Arts

Prof. Peter Benz

Member of the Commission

President of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

 

 

Peter Benz was born in Austria in 1971 to a German father and Peruvian mother. He grew up in Greece before graduating from high school in Mannheim in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. After he completed his civilian service, he began studying film and theatre studies, art history and psychology in Erlangen. Following this, he took up studying architecture at the TU Kaiserslautern in 1993. After graduating with a »Vordiplom«, Benz transferred to the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 1996 (then called the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering) where he graduated in 1998 with a diploma in architecture.

 

 

After graduating, he worked from Weimar as a freelance exhibition designer and in 2001, was invited to teach as an artistic staff member in the Media Events department of the Bauhaus-Universtät Weimar’s Faculty of Media. In 2006, he began working as an assistant professor at the newly established Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong University where he was promoted to associate professor in 2014. In Hong Kong, he helped establish the Academy both at the faculty level and the university level as, for instance, Associate Director (Academic Affairs); Programme Director of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Visual Arts; Programme Coordinator of the Craft and Design division; and Programme Coordinator of the MVA (Experience Design).

 

 

Today, Benz describes himself as an »experiential designer« and is focussed on researching and developing »experiences« as a creative medium. To do so, he uses the courses he teaches as experimental platforms for testing new approaches. He is also interested in the design potential of everyday objects and of un-designed spaces. His projects have recently begun to focus on issues of livelihood, gender integration and the social impact of how creative careers are portrayed. They also focus on the development of creative tools for teaching in the field of art and design.

 

 

 

Foto Nikolaus Forgo
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.
Natural and Technical Sciences

Prof.
Hartmut Löwen

Member of the Commission

Department of Theoretical Physics

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf – Germany

Hartmut Löwen is a theoretical physicist and C4 professor at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the University of Dortmund since 1982 and received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1987 with a thesis on phase transitions in polarons. He then went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich as an assistant and habilitated there in 1993. In 1990-1991 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon (France). Since 1995, he has held a chair of Theoretical Physics at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf.

 

As part of his research career, Löwen was Schlumberger Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (England) in 2001-2003. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Universita di Roma La Sapienza (2005) and at the University of Oxford (2010).

 

Hartmut Löwen’s scientific focus is on statistical physics and soft matter physics. He was the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center TR6 Physics of Colloidal Dispersions in External Fields from 2002-2013. In 2010, Löwen was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. Since 2017, he has been an associate editor of the journal Europhysics Letters. From 2007-2013, Löwen was a Vertrauensdozent of the German Research Foundation and from 2014-2021 he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation.

Prof. dr F.R. Rosendaal (Frits). Frits Rosendaal (1959) studied medicine at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (medical degree: 1985), and obtained his Ph.D. in Leiden (1989), with a thesis on hemophilia. Ever since, he has been appointed jointly at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and the Department of Thrombosis and Hemostasis. He became Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in 1997, with a chair that was aptly named “Clinical Epidemiology of Thrombosis and Hemostasis”. Since 1999, he is head of the department of Clinical Epidemiology, and since 2007 also of the Department of Thrombosis and Hemostasis. The Ph.D. thesis of Frits Rosendaal dealt with medical and social aspects of haemophilia treatment, at a time when the benefits of adequate treatment with clotting factor concentrates became evident, but also the negative effects, with the devastating effects of AIDS caused by blood-transmission of HIV. His thesis was called ‘Hemophilia: the best of times, the worst of times’. This study was the third in a series of national surveys started in 1972 in Leiden. He subsequently supervised the fourth and fifth edition of ‘Hemophilia in the Netherlands’. His main research theme has become thrombosis, and he led the first formal epidemiological case-control study in the aetiology of venous thrombosis: the Leiden Thrombophilia Study (LETS). This study was instrumental in the identification of a new series of risk factors for venous thrombosis, such as factor V Leiden, prothrombin 20210A, high levels of factor VIII, factor IX, factor XI and TAFI. It also played a major role in the discovery that certain oral contraceptives (socalled 3rd generation pills) are less safe than others, and of the synergistic effect of factor V Leiden and oral contraceptive use on the risk of venous thrombosis. Subsequent large projects in the area of venous thrombosis were the EPCOT study, a European project into the risks of disease in familial thrombophilia, the WRIGHT pro
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.

Foto Oefner_1


Life Sciences

Prof.
Peter Oefner

Member of the Commission

Institute of Functional Genomics
University of Regensburg – Germany

 

Peter Oefner serves as chair of the Institute of Functional Genomics at the University of Regensburg. After graduating from medical school in Innsbruck, he worked as a contract assistant at the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, before moving to the Department of Genetics at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Senior Fulbright Scholar. From 1994 till 2005, he worked first as Research Associate at the Department of Biochemistry, and was then appointed Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. In 2000, he qualified as a university lecturer in bioanalytical chemistry in the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Innsbruck. In December 2004 , he was appointed full professor and, subsequently, director of the newly founded Institute of Functional Genomics made possible by funds from the Bavarian Network of Genome Research (BayGene). In 2012/13, he spent a one-year sabbatical at the Centre for Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Peter Oefner began already during his studies at the Department of Urology and the Institute of Analytical Chemistry and Radiochemistry, under the supervision of Prof. Günther Bonn, with the development and application of capillary electrophoretic and liquid chromatographic separation methods for the determination of primary and secondary metabolites and, subsequently, nucleic acids. The development of a polymer-based stationary phase for high-resolution liquid chromatography of DNA fragments, together with Christian Huber, now Professor at the University of Salzburg, was the basis for the invention of denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) for the high-throughput identification of mutations, which found worldwide use in mutation diagnostics prior to the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies. Peter Oefner used the method among other things for the identification of gene variants on the Y-chromosome, which he applied in collaboration with Prof. Cavalli-Sforza to the reconstruction of prehistoric migrations of Homo sapiens. He also generated the first genome wide map of biallelic polymorphisms for a higher eukaryotic organism, namely Arabidopsis thaliana, and the successful isolation of the transcription factor RSF1, which plays an important role in phytochrome A signaling and light adaptation of plants. He also contributed to the mapping and functional characterization of the first quantitative trait locus in yeast enabling pathogenic strains to grow at elevated human body temperatures. After moving to Regensburg, he returned to his interest in cell metabolism and, in particular, how tumor cell metabolites enable cancers to escape immune recognition and destruction, which was the research focus of the Clinical Research Group KFO262 funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Peter Oefner. Further research interests are the impact of gut microbial metabolites of gut bacteria on the human immune system and the development and progression of heart and kidney as well as autoimmune diseases, and the development of molecular and clinical signatures for the stratification and prognostication of diseases.

 

He has been a member and, since 2014, the chair of the doctoral steering committee of the Biomedical International Graduate School (BioMediGS) of the Faculty of Medicine, in addition to being a member of the doctoral steering committee of the Regensburg International Graduate School of Life Sciences (RIGeL) of the Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine at the University of Regensburg. From 2017 to 2023, he was speaker of the „Else Kröner-Forschungskolleg Regensburg – Interdisciplinary translational Immuno-Oncology“, which trained young clinical residents in translational research in preparation for a dual career as clinician scientists. Peter Oefner has been Founding, Associate and Section Editor of several international, peer-reviewed journals and (co-)organizer of congresses and symposia in the fields of analytical chemistry, genetics, metabolomics, and systems biology.


Humanities

Prof.
Reinold Schmücker

Member of the Commission

Department of Philosophy

Universität Münster – Deutschland

Reinold Schmücker, founding academic manager of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald from 2004 to 2009, has been professor of philosophy at the University of Münster since 2009. From 2020 to 2024, he was Dean of this university’s Faculty of History/Philosophy, and from 2022 to 2025, he was President of the German Society for Philosophy.

After studying philosophy, German language and literature, and Protestant theology, Reinold Schmücker received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1997 with a thesis on the foundations of the philosophy of art. His research focuses on the philosophy of artefacts, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, ethics, cultural philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.

From 2010 to 2018, Reinold Schmücker was a member of the Centre for Advanced Study Theoretische Grundfragen der Normenbegründung in Medizinethik und Biopolitik (Fundamental Questions of Normative Justification in Medical Ethics and Biopolitics). In the 2015/16 academic year, together with legal scholar Thomas Dreier and Czech media scholar Pavel Zahrádka, he led an international research group on The Ethics of Copying at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, which he had initiated. Since 2023, he has been spokesperson for the Centre for Advanced Study Zugang zu kulturellen Gütern im digitalen Wandel (Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change) at the University of Münster, which he heads together with art historian Ursula Frohne, and co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Journal of Aesthetics and General Art Studies). In 2024, he organised the XXVI German Congress of Philosophy at the University of Münster under the theme #digital|denken.

His most important book publications include the monographs ‘Was ist Kunst? Eine Grundlegung’ (‘What is Art? A Groundwork; 1998, 2nd edition 2014) and ‘Gibt es einen gerechten Krieg?’ (‘Is There Such a Thing as a Just War?’; 2021, 2nd edition 2025), as well as several anthologies he co-edited on the philosophy of art and fundamental questions of ethics and applied ethics, including ‘The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying’ (2016), ‘Vorrang der Moral? Eine metaethische Kontroverse’ (‘Primacy of Morality? A Metaethical Controversy’; 2017), ‘Zeit – eine normative Ressource?’ (‘Time – A Normative Resource?’; 2018) and ‘Die zeitliche Dimension der Gerechtigkeit’ (‘The Temporal Dimension of Justice’; 2020).

AM_quadrat
Law

Prof.
Regina E. Aebi-Müller

Deputy Chair of the Commission

Faculty of Law, University of Lucerne – Switzerland Regina E. Aebi-Müller graduated in law from the University of Bern and was admitted to the bar of the Canton of Bern in 1997. This was followed by a doctorate with a focus on family and inheritance law. In 2005, she completed her habilitation on the system of the protection of personality in civil law. Since the same year, she has been a full professor of private law and comparative private law at the University of Lucerne. Her research focuses on medical law, family law, the law of persons (capacity to act, protection of personality, law of associations and foundations) and the law of succession. She has authored numerous publications, partly in the context of externally funded research projects, and is a member of national and international professional societies. Since 2016, she has been co-editor of the renowned «Berner Kommentar». Regina E. Aebi-Müller has been a member of the Central Ethics Committee of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences since June 2017 and a member of the Expert Committee of Alzheimer Switzerland since 2019. She was a Research Councillor at the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2021 and Vice-President of this division from 2017 to 2021. She was also a member and Vice President of the Commission for Scientific Integrity of the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2017 to 2021. Since 2020, Regina E. Aebi-Müller has been Prorector for Personnel and Professorships at the University of Lucerne and, a spart of that position, President of the University Equal Opportunities Commission. Since 2011, she has been an investigator in cases of sexual harassment. From 2007 to 2011, she was Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Lucerne.
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) Fachbereich Wirtschaft- und Sozialwissenschaften (WISO) Prof. Dr. Johannes Rincke Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Wirtschaftspolitik 10.11.2022 ©Giulia Iannicelli
Economic Sciences

Prof.
Johannes Rincke

Member of the Commission

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Fachbereich Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften

 

Johannes Rincke is full professor of economics at the department of economics, business and society at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. After studying economics at Free University Berlin, he started his academic career at the Centre for European Economic Research and the University of Mannheim and obtained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Göttingen in 2006. He then joined LMU Munich as a Post Doc. After research stays at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), he became professor of economics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In his research, Johannes Rincke uses experimental methods to answer question in the area of behavioral economics. Among other topics, he has repeatedly investigated under which conditions people tend to behave in accordance to existing rules and norms. Johannes Rincke is acting chairman of the ethic committee at the department of economics, business and society at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Katrin Auspurg_quadrat
Social Sciences

Prof. Dr.
Katrin Auspurg

Member of the Commission

Department of Sociology

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München – Germany

Katrin Auspurg is full professor of sociology with a focus on quantitative methods of empirical social research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). She holds a diploma in social work from the University of Applied Sciences in Munich and a diploma in sociology from the LMU Munich. She received her doctorate in 2010 from the University of Konstanz, in 2014 she was appointed to a professorship at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2015, she was appointed to the LMU Munich.

 

Her research interests include methods of empirical social research (surveys and experiments), labor market and family sociology. In particular, her research focuses on questions of the perception of social inequality and attitudes towards redistribution. She is also interested in careers in science and the extent and conditions of replicability of social science research. Another research focus is on incentive structures and social dilemmas, for example in the field of environmental behavior and in academia. In the area of multifactorial survey experiments, she has published an English-language textbook and several articles on methodological and substantive issues. She has been a commission member at ÖAWI since 2022.

 

Selected Publications:

  • Auspurg, Katrin/Brüderl, Josef (2021): Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World.
  • Auspurg Katrin/Schneck, Andreas/Hinz, Thomas (2018): Closed Doors Everywhere? A Meta-Analyses of Field Experiments on Ethnic Discrimination in Rental Housing Markets. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 45(1), 95-114.
  • Auspurg, Katrin/Hinz, Thomas/Sauer, Carsten (2017): Why Should Women Get Less? Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap from Multifactorial Survey Experiments. American Sociological Review 82 (1), 179-210.
  • Auspurg, Katrin/Hinz, Thomas/Schneck, Andreas (2014): Ausmaß und Risikofaktoren des Publication Bias in der deutschen Soziologie. [Prevalence and Risk-Factors of Publication Bias in German Sociology.] Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 66 (4), 549-573.
DominiqueWollniokfull


Development of the Arts

Prof. Peter Benz

Member of the Commission

President of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

 

 

Peter Benz was born in Austria in 1971 to a German father and Peruvian mother. He grew up in Greece before graduating from high school in Mannheim in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. After he completed his civilian service, he began studying film and theatre studies, art history and psychology in Erlangen. Following this, he took up studying architecture at the TU Kaiserslautern in 1993. After graduating with a »Vordiplom«, Benz transferred to the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in 1996 (then called the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering) where he graduated in 1998 with a diploma in architecture.

 

 

After graduating, he worked from Weimar as a freelance exhibition designer and in 2001, was invited to teach as an artistic staff member in the Media Events department of the Bauhaus-Universtät Weimar’s Faculty of Media. In 2006, he began working as an assistant professor at the newly established Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong University where he was promoted to associate professor in 2014. In Hong Kong, he helped establish the Academy both at the faculty level and the university level as, for instance, Associate Director (Academic Affairs); Programme Director of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Visual Arts; Programme Coordinator of the Craft and Design division; and Programme Coordinator of the MVA (Experience Design).

 

 

Today, Benz describes himself as an »experiential designer« and is focussed on researching and developing »experiences« as a creative medium. To do so, he uses the courses he teaches as experimental platforms for testing new approaches. He is also interested in the design potential of everyday objects and of un-designed spaces. His projects have recently begun to focus on issues of livelihood, gender integration and the social impact of how creative careers are portrayed. They also focus on the development of creative tools for teaching in the field of art and design.

 

 

 

Foto Nikolaus Forgo
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.
Natural and Technical Sciences

Prof.
Hartmut Löwen

Member of the Commission

Department of Theoretical Physics

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf – Germany

Hartmut Löwen is a theoretical physicist and C4 professor at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the University of Dortmund since 1982 and received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1987 with a thesis on phase transitions in polarons. He then went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich as an assistant and habilitated there in 1993. In 1990-1991 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon (France). Since 1995, he has held a chair of Theoretical Physics at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf.

 

As part of his research career, Löwen was Schlumberger Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (England) in 2001-2003. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Universita di Roma La Sapienza (2005) and at the University of Oxford (2010).

 

Hartmut Löwen’s scientific focus is on statistical physics and soft matter physics. He was the spokesperson of the Collaborative Research Center TR6 Physics of Colloidal Dispersions in External Fields from 2002-2013. In 2010, Löwen was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. Since 2017, he has been an associate editor of the journal Europhysics Letters. From 2007-2013, Löwen was a Vertrauensdozent of the German Research Foundation and from 2014-2021 he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation.

Prof. dr F.R. Rosendaal (Frits). Frits Rosendaal (1959) studied medicine at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (medical degree: 1985), and obtained his Ph.D. in Leiden (1989), with a thesis on hemophilia. Ever since, he has been appointed jointly at the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and the Department of Thrombosis and Hemostasis. He became Professor of Clinical Epidemiology in 1997, with a chair that was aptly named “Clinical Epidemiology of Thrombosis and Hemostasis”. Since 1999, he is head of the department of Clinical Epidemiology, and since 2007 also of the Department of Thrombosis and Hemostasis. The Ph.D. thesis of Frits Rosendaal dealt with medical and social aspects of haemophilia treatment, at a time when the benefits of adequate treatment with clotting factor concentrates became evident, but also the negative effects, with the devastating effects of AIDS caused by blood-transmission of HIV. His thesis was called ‘Hemophilia: the best of times, the worst of times’. This study was the third in a series of national surveys started in 1972 in Leiden. He subsequently supervised the fourth and fifth edition of ‘Hemophilia in the Netherlands’. His main research theme has become thrombosis, and he led the first formal epidemiological case-control study in the aetiology of venous thrombosis: the Leiden Thrombophilia Study (LETS). This study was instrumental in the identification of a new series of risk factors for venous thrombosis, such as factor V Leiden, prothrombin 20210A, high levels of factor VIII, factor IX, factor XI and TAFI. It also played a major role in the discovery that certain oral contraceptives (socalled 3rd generation pills) are less safe than others, and of the synergistic effect of factor V Leiden and oral contraceptive use on the risk of venous thrombosis. Subsequent large projects in the area of venous thrombosis were the EPCOT study, a European project into the risks of disease in familial thrombophilia, the WRIGHT pro
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.

Foto Oefner_1


Life Sciences

Prof.
Peter Oefner

Member of the Commission

Institute of Functional Genomics
University of Regensburg – Germany

 

Peter Oefner serves as chair of the Institute of Functional Genomics at the University of Regensburg. After graduating from medical school in Innsbruck, he worked as a contract assistant at the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, before moving to the Department of Genetics at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA, as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Senior Fulbright Scholar. From 1994 till 2005, he worked first as Research Associate at the Department of Biochemistry, and was then appointed Senior Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. In 2000, he qualified as a university lecturer in bioanalytical chemistry in the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Innsbruck. In December 2004 , he was appointed full professor and, subsequently, director of the newly founded Institute of Functional Genomics made possible by funds from the Bavarian Network of Genome Research (BayGene). In 2012/13, he spent a one-year sabbatical at the Centre for Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Peter Oefner began already during his studies at the Department of Urology and the Institute of Analytical Chemistry and Radiochemistry, under the supervision of Prof. Günther Bonn, with the development and application of capillary electrophoretic and liquid chromatographic separation methods for the determination of primary and secondary metabolites and, subsequently, nucleic acids. The development of a polymer-based stationary phase for high-resolution liquid chromatography of DNA fragments, together with Christian Huber, now Professor at the University of Salzburg, was the basis for the invention of denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) for the high-throughput identification of mutations, which found worldwide use in mutation diagnostics prior to the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies. Peter Oefner used the method among other things for the identification of gene variants on the Y-chromosome, which he applied in collaboration with Prof. Cavalli-Sforza to the reconstruction of prehistoric migrations of Homo sapiens. He also generated the first genome wide map of biallelic polymorphisms for a higher eukaryotic organism, namely Arabidopsis thaliana, and the successful isolation of the transcription factor RSF1, which plays an important role in phytochrome A signaling and light adaptation of plants. He also contributed to the mapping and functional characterization of the first quantitative trait locus in yeast enabling pathogenic strains to grow at elevated human body temperatures. After moving to Regensburg, he returned to his interest in cell metabolism and, in particular, how tumor cell metabolites enable cancers to escape immune recognition and destruction, which was the research focus of the Clinical Research Group KFO262 funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Peter Oefner. Further research interests are the impact of gut microbial metabolites of gut bacteria on the human immune system and the development and progression of heart and kidney as well as autoimmune diseases, and the development of molecular and clinical signatures for the stratification and prognostication of diseases.

 

He has been a member and, since 2014, the chair of the doctoral steering committee of the Biomedical International Graduate School (BioMediGS) of the Faculty of Medicine, in addition to being a member of the doctoral steering committee of the Regensburg International Graduate School of Life Sciences (RIGeL) of the Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine at the University of Regensburg. From 2017 to 2023, he was speaker of the „Else Kröner-Forschungskolleg Regensburg – Interdisciplinary translational Immuno-Oncology“, which trained young clinical residents in translational research in preparation for a dual career as clinician scientists. Peter Oefner has been Founding, Associate and Section Editor of several international, peer-reviewed journals and (co-)organizer of congresses and symposia in the fields of analytical chemistry, genetics, metabolomics, and systems biology.


Humanities

Prof.
Reinold Schmücker

Member of the Commission

Department of Philosophy

Universität Münster – Deutschland

Reinold Schmücker, founding academic manager of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald from 2004 to 2009, has been professor of philosophy at the University of Münster since 2009. From 2020 to 2024, he was Dean of this university’s Faculty of History/Philosophy, and from 2022 to 2025, he was President of the German Society for Philosophy.

After studying philosophy, German language and literature, and Protestant theology, Reinold Schmücker received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1997 with a thesis on the foundations of the philosophy of art. His research focuses on the philosophy of artefacts, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, ethics, cultural philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law.

From 2010 to 2018, Reinold Schmücker was a member of the Centre for Advanced Study Theoretische Grundfragen der Normenbegründung in Medizinethik und Biopolitik (Fundamental Questions of Normative Justification in Medical Ethics and Biopolitics). In the 2015/16 academic year, together with legal scholar Thomas Dreier and Czech media scholar Pavel Zahrádka, he led an international research group on The Ethics of Copying at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University, which he had initiated. Since 2023, he has been spokesperson for the Centre for Advanced Study Zugang zu kulturellen Gütern im digitalen Wandel (Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change) at the University of Münster, which he heads together with art historian Ursula Frohne, and co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (Journal of Aesthetics and General Art Studies). In 2024, he organised the XXVI German Congress of Philosophy at the University of Münster under the theme #digital|denken.

His most important book publications include the monographs ‘Was ist Kunst? Eine Grundlegung’ (‘What is Art? A Groundwork; 1998, 2nd edition 2014) and ‘Gibt es einen gerechten Krieg?’ (‘Is There Such a Thing as a Just War?’; 2021, 2nd edition 2025), as well as several anthologies he co-edited on the philosophy of art and fundamental questions of ethics and applied ethics, including ‘The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying’ (2016), ‘Vorrang der Moral? Eine metaethische Kontroverse’ (‘Primacy of Morality? A Metaethical Controversy’; 2017), ‘Zeit – eine normative Ressource?’ (‘Time – A Normative Resource?’; 2018) and ‘Die zeitliche Dimension der Gerechtigkeit’ (‘The Temporal Dimension of Justice’; 2020).

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