Dr. Thomas König

Head of Strategy and Scientific Services
+43 1 59991 164
thomas.koenig@ihs.ac.at

Sociology of science and innovation

Research policy: evaluation, performance, legitimacy

Science policy: science for policy, policy for science

Organizational study of social sciences

History of social sciences

Bild Thomas Koenig
  • As a research manager, I have two decades of experience in interdisciplinary research, with research organisations, and with science policy. I have worked in national (Austrian), European and international contexts, and thanks to my excellent communication and networking skills, I am a reliable broker of cooperation among stakeholders. I do quantitative and qualitative analyses, and have acquired leadership skills through my experience in managing small to medium-size teams. My main areas of interest and expertise include: research and innovation, social sciences and humanities (SSH), societal challenges and SDGs, open science, academic publications, peer review and evaluation practices, research funding and research governance.

    At IHS, I am mainly responsible for all matters concerning strategy and scientific services. I have been involved with the strategy-finding process in 2015, and implementing the IHS mission. Among other things, this concerns negotiating performance agreements with the research groups, drafting the annual work program, establishing and monitoring internal scientific service units, supporting the IHS Scientific Advisory Board, and preparing and supporting the external evaluation in 2019. I am also coordinating our growing group of PhD candidates.

    Academically, I work on questions related to the governance of science and, more broadly, the sociology of science and innovation. Ongoing projects relate to the history and sociology of social sciences, research funding and research policy in the EU, and touch on issues such as academic autonomy, decision-making, bibliometrics, impact analysis. My publications include a monograph on the European Research Council, which has been published with Polity Press in 2017. For a while, I had been writing a blog on the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, "Politik Macht Wissenschaft". Currently, I lead a project on the history of the IHS (funded by the OeNB Jubiläumsfonds) and am the supervisor of a MSCA fellowship at the institute. In addition, I am mentoring three PhD projects (Andreas Huber; Magdalena Wicher; Shauna Stack).

    In the past, I have been a Governing Board member of the grassroots organisation EuroScience (2012-2018), and have been the Managing Editor of the Austrian Journal of Political Science (OZP) (2012-2015). Since 2018, I am a member of the editorial team of the Journal Serendipities (Open Access). During the pandemic, I joined the Future Operations Platform to provide scientific expertise to policy-makers. Occasionaly, I teach a course at the University of Vienna.

    For further details on my track record, see my publications in IRIHS
    ORC-ID: 000-0003-4337-5163
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