Helga Nowotny is professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich, and a founding member and former president of the European Research Council. .

She has held teaching and research positions at universities and research institutions in several countries in Europe and continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at European and international level. Among other, she is currently member of the Board of Trustees of the Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin, Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna and was Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received multiple honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

She has been honoured with the rarely awarded Gold Medal of the Academia Europaea, the Leibniz-Medaille of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaftenand the British Academy President’s Medal. She has received honorary doctorates from universities and academic institutions in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Norway, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

She has published widely in science and technology studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest publication In AI we Trust. Power, Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms was been published by Polity Press in 2021. Other recent publications are The Cunning of Uncertainty (Polity, 2015) and An Orderly Mess (CEU Press, 2017).