FACULTY

• Department of Water - Atmosphere – Environment

• Department of Civil Engineering and Natural Hazards

• Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Sciences

• Department of Economics and Social Sciences
   
• Department of Forest and Soil Sciences
   
• Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems

Markus FIEBIG is Professor at the Institute of Applied Geology in the Department of Civil Engineering and Natural Hazards. The focus of his research has been the development of palaeoclimate and related landscapes in Alpine mountain regions worldwide. He is an expert in physical dating of landforms and geological mapping of young environments. In hydrogeological investigations he works together with the Vienna Water Management company (WGM). Within a international consortium he develops new approaches to study Alpine palaeoclimate in relation to modeling of future water supply. An intended international continental drilling project focus on the genesis of Alpine valleys. Actual research is about the relation between mankind and earth history in the frame of geoethics.
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Georg GRATZER is Associate Professor and deputy head of the Institute of Forest Ecology at the Department of Forest and Soil Sciences. He is head of the steering group of BOKU’s Centre for Development Research. His research interests gravitate around sustainable development and dynamic processes in forest ecosystems and spans many continents, providing a global perspective on mountain forests and human communities.  He also directs the Mountain Forestry Graduate Program, which brings masters students together from around the world – particularly mountainous regions of Africa, the European Alps, and the Himalayas. He is committed to improving livelihoods in poor countries through University education and research for development. Since the adoption of the Agenda 2030, he explores the potential of the SDGs for tackling global challenges and on the role of Universities in reaching them.
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Astrid GÜHNEMANN is Professor of Transport for Sustainable Development and Head of the Institute for Transport Studies. Her research focus is on the development of methods for sustainability assessment in transport, based on environmental and ecological economics and system dynamics modelling in transport with the aim to analyse long-term impacts of transport policies, strategies, infrastructure investments, technological and societal changes. She has taken a leading role in many European and national research projects that aimed at assessing the impacts of transport and developing innovative policies to deal with them.

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Marion HUBER-HUMER is Full Professor for Global Waste Management at the Department Water- Atmosphere-Environment, and Head of the Institute of Waste Management (ABF-BOKU). She has founded and led the international IWWG-task group CLEAR for 15 years and is now board member of the IWWG (International Waste Working Group), board member of the ÖVA (Austrian Association for Management of Contaminated Sites), and vice president of ISWA-Austria. Her current research focuses on the investigation of sustainable global waste management concepts and circular economy approaches, biological waste processing, nano-waste treatment, sustainable landfill technologies, process and emission monitoring.
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Jochen KANTELHARDT is Professor of Business Management of Sustainable Agricultural Systems. He currently heads the Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Economics at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences. He has extensive research experience in farm management, agricultural economics as well as agricultural and agri-environmental policy analysis. His research focus is on the questions of optimal farm development, benefits and costs of agricultural programs and the optimal combination of policy instruments from farm perspective. He has extensive experience in interdisciplinary and participatory research and he is leading and contributing to many national and international projects (H2020, FP7). Currently, he is president of the Austrian Society of Agricultural Economics (ÖGA) and he is leading the Centre of Agriculture (CAS) at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. 
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Günter LANGERGRABER is senior scientist at the Institute of Sanitary Engineering and Water Pollution Control. His research focus is on nature-based solutions (NBS) and resources-oriented sanitation systems, both as stand-alone research topics as well as in combination. To cope with global challenges, NBS are researched to create circular economy in urban settings. Interdisciplinary settings are required for implementation of these solutions. Currently he is Chair of the COST Action Circular City and leader of the Working Group on SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) in the UniNEtZ, a project in which 15 Austrian universities work together on developing options for achieving SDGs in Austria. 
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Stefanie LEMKE is professor and head of the Institute for Development Research, Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems. Her research experience spans more than 20 years, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Areas of work include the human right to adequate food/nutrition, gender, women’s rights, food/ nutrition security, sustainable diets, local food systems, sustainable livelihoods, governance of natural resources. She applies gender-transformative, rights-based, feminist, participatory and transdisciplinary approaches, co-conceptualizing research with local actors. She also worked as consultant for various civil service organizations in the fields of nutrition counselling and livelihoods of smallholder farmers.
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Andreas MELCHER is head of the Centre for Development Research (CDR). From 1996 to 2017 he worked as a senior scientist in aquatic ecosystem management and modelling at the institute of hydrobiology and aquatic ecosystem management (IHG). His work is based on trans-disciplinary and participatory concepts in applied environmental assessment and adaptive management processes, incorporating ecological and social system analyses – in particular, environmental monitoring and assessment, aquatic ecosystem management, and applied development research. One particular aim is to be engaged in implementing interdisciplinary research results into practice (SDGs). This expanding scope of a cross over applied research has naturally incorporated ecological cause effect analyses, system analyses, social and gender aspects. His scientific interest also includes capacity building in higher education in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Bhutan, Nepal or Iran.
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Marianne PENKER is Professor for Rural Sociology and Rural Development at the Institute for Sustainable Economic Development. She is fascinated by interacting and co-evolving social and ecological systems and transnational comparisons of rural development. For two decades, she has approached rural development issues from a socio-institutional perspective, with an empirical focus on agro-food systems, landscapes, renewable energy, demographic and climate change. Sustainable rural development requires the collective management of commons, such as landscapes, natural resources, culinary or cultural heritage. In this context, she wants to understand how formal rules, social norms and values interact and co-evolve with land use practices.
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Petra RIEFLER is Professor at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences. She heads the Institute of Marketing and Innovation. Having a management background, her research area is consumer behavior in terms of attitude formation and purchase decision processes. Her substantive work focuses on consumers’ response to local/regional/global branding strategies, consumers’ attitude towards green products, and the role of framing in sustainable marketing claims, among others. Her methodological work relates to scale development, measurement models in survey research, structural equation models, and experimental study designs.

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Yusak SUSILO is BMK Endowed Professor in Digitalisation and Automation in Transport and Mobility System and the Head of DAVeMoS endowed research group at the Institute for Transport Studies. His research interest is on individual’s travel behaviours and decision making processes, and the interaction of such mechanisms with changes in activity locations, urban form, policies, environments and technology characteristics. Users' adaptation and learning processes towards new options, such as digitalisation, automation and other new technologies to have been the focus of his research in recent years.

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Christoph WINCKLER is Professor for Livestock Ecology at the Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems. His research is rooted in animal welfare science and focuses on (on-farm) welfare assessment (e.g. development and validation of animal-based welfare indicators, assessment of affective states), health and welfare improvement strategies (including epidemiological approaches) as well as the trade-offs/synergies regarding animal welfare and other aspects of sustainability of livestock farming. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the field of animal behaviour, livestock husbandry, welfare assessment and organic livestock husbandry.

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Maria WURZINGER is Senior Scientist at the Livestock Division and at the Center for Development Research. Her research focuses on livestock production systems in marginal areas in the global South. Using a participatory research approach, she develops breeding strategies for smallholder farmers. She is also interested in documenting local knowledge and identifying and testing possible intervention strategies for a more sustainable livestock production. She also cooperates with different universities in the Global South on the development of innovative curricula in the field of Animal Sciences at Bachelor and Masters level.

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Werner ZOLLITSCH is Professor for Sustainability of Livestock Production Systems with the Division of Livestock Sciences of the Department of Sustainable Agricultural Systems. He is also head of the BOKU-Centre of Global Change and Sustainability. His main research interests are directed towards analysis of sustainability aspects of livestock production systems; impacts of feeding strategies on various aspects of animal production, particularly in a low-input and organic farming context and feed resource development for livestock production are also covered. Teaching activities focus on livestock production systems, sustainability assessment of livestock production and feeding strategies in organic farming. 
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Bernd GIESE is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Safety and Risk Sciences (ISR) at BOKU University. In his research area of technology assessment, he follows an approach oriented towards the technological character and underlying paradigms of research and development. In addition to specific, technology-related studies, he is engaged in the further development of methods for prospective technology characterization and risk assessment and for analysing the vulnerability of potentially affected systems. The aim of his work is to find low-risk development paths for new technologies. The research area's contributions to the design of innovation processes and the governance of technology applications are made on behalf of and in cooperation with government agencies, the EU Commission and OECD working groups.
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Karl HOGL is Professor at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences and head of the Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy (InFER). He has managed national and international research co‐operations and projects, including inter-disciplinary projects, was coordinator of a EU Framework Programme project on “New Modes of Governance for Sustainable Forestry in Europe”. The focus of his research is forest policy including related domains such as climate policy, nature conservation policy and, more recently, policies for the protection against natural hazards (in particular flood risk management) . As a renowned expert, he was member of the Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP), an initiative of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) and several other organisations (including UNEP, FAO, UNDP, and UNFCCC) that provide independent scientific knowledge on forestry issues to policy makers on an international level. Furthermore, he is active in research-based policy advice, e.g. for associations, federal ministries, and the European Commission.
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Patrick SCHERHAUFER is researcher and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Forest, Environmental, and Natural Resource Policy (InFER) at BOKU University. His research focuses on public policy, science, technology and environmental politics, participatory governance and democracy, knowledge integration and inter- and transdisciplinarity. He holds a doctoral degree in political science from the University of Vienna and has published in journals like Energy Policy, Energy Research & Social Science, Futures and Environmental Politics. 

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