IHS - People

At IHS, I am mainly responsible for supporting the director in all matters concerning strategy and scientific services. I have been involved with the strategy-finding process in 2015, and implementing the new IHS mission has been my main responsibility since then. 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 the IHS fellowship program and our growing group of PhD candidates.

As a research manager, I have almost 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 reliant 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.

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 most recent publications include a monograph on the European Research Council, the first comprehensive analysis of its history, organisational setup, and impact, which has been published with Polity Press in January 2017. I write a blog on the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, "Politik Macht Wissenschaft"

In recent years, 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 (also Open Access). For further details see my recent publications in IRIHS; Twitter: @th_koenig; ORC-ID: 000-0003-4337-5163; Google Scholar