Ulrike Felt - Biography#

Ulrike Felt is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. She also leads an interfaculty research platform, a collaboration between social sciences and members of the life-sciences community on "Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice". From 2014-2018 she was Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in physics and a habilitation in the social sciences.

Her research focuses on issues of governance, democracy and public participation in technoscience, changing research cultures, as well as the role of time in science and society issues. Her work covers fields as diverse as the life sciences, biomedicine, nanotechnologies, nuclear energy and sustainability/environmental research. Currently she is looking into questions of big data and their role across a number of domains (life science, health and environment).
Her research is frequently done in interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers from the sciences in order to address the topics from within the respective communities. It is often comparative between national/cultural contexts and technological or scientific fields.

She has been invited professor at numerous universities and has been involved in policy advice to the European Commission, the European Science Foundation, the European University Association as well as to national bodies.

From 2002 to 2007 she was editor-in-chief of Science, Technology, & Human Values, the core jounral in the field of Science and Technology Studies and has been leading the publication of the most recent Handbook of Science and Technology Studies with MIT Press (2017).

In 2014 she received together with a group of STS scholars the Ziman Award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology and in 2017 the Infrastructure Award for exemplary contributions to STS scholarship and field building. She is 2015 winner of the Austrian State Prize, Ars Docendi, for innovative excellent teaching.

Since 2017 she is president of European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST).