Helga Nowotny is a Professor Emerita of Science and Technology Studies at ETH Zurich, a founding member, and former President of the European Research Council.
She has held teaching and research positions at universities and research institutions in Europe and Singapore and continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at European and international levels. Among other things, she is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation in Berlin; a Senior Fellow at the Florence School of Transnational Governance; a member of the Council of Administration of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study; a member of the Austrian Council for Sciences, Technology, and Innovation; and Chair of the Science Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, including from the University of Oxford, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
She is the author of In AI we Trust: Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms (2021), The Cunning of Uncertainty (2015), Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age (with Giuseppe Testa) (2011), Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future (2008), and Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (1994).