Roland Werner Scholz (* 15. April 1950 in Halle (Saale)) is a German mathematician, psychologist, and Professor Emeritus of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich. He famously coined the terms transdisciplinarity and societal didactics.
Roland Scholz earned his undergraduate and master's degrees in mathematics at the University of Marburg (1976), a PhD degree in social psychology (Dr. phil., 1987), and a habilitation degree (Dr. phil. habil.) in cognitive psychology. In the late 1980s, he shifted from basic research to the emerging environmental sciences. From 1993 until 2012, Dr. Scholz held the chair of Natural and Social Science Interface at the Department of Environmental System Sciences at ETH Zurich. Following his retirement in 2013, he also worked as an adjunct professor (Privatdozent) at the Department of Psychology at the University of Zurich, is affiliated as Professor Extraordinaire at the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University (SA) and works as project leader at the Fraunhofer Society Project Group for Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS (Alzenau, Germany). Scholz was the fifth holder of the King Carl XVI GustafProfessorship (2001/2002) at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Scholz has contributed to mathematical and psychological game theory and decision theory, environmental modeling, risk perception, and risk assessment. His basic research has been dedicated to negotiation and coalition formation, decision making under uncertainty, and stochastic thinking, and has followed the concept of bounded rationality. His experimental work has demonstrated that scales of aspirational levels constitute a proper psychological concept for modeling utility functions on the level of the individual, and that decision-making under uncertainty may be based on two complementary cognitive processes, i.e., the intuitive and analytic modes of thought. Since the early 1990s, Scholz has focused on decision and transformation processes of urban and regional systems, organizations, and policy processes.
Scholz is one of the pioneers of the theory and practice of transdisciplinary research and processes. According to his work, which manifested itself as part of the Zurich 2000 definition, transdisciplinarity is different from interdisciplinarity, since, as a core characteristic, knowledge integration and mutual learning among science and society together with co-leadership are crucial elements when striving towards socially robust orientations for sustainable development. From a methodological and didactic perspective, the embedded case study became a powerful method for supporting transdisciplinary processes. Since 1993, he has been an innovator and scientific leader of the first transdisciplinarity laboratory and initiated large-scale transdisciplinary projects on sustainable transitions of urban, agricultural, ecological, technological, economic, and political systems. He was co-leader of the Global TraPs International Fertilizer Development Center#Global Transdisciplinary Processes for Sustainable Phosphorus Management (Global TraPs) project – the first global project on sustainable resources management in regard to phosphorus – which included representatives of all key stakeholder groups of the supply–demand chain.
His current scientific work focuses on resilient coupled human–environment systems. Scholz investigates how the rationales of human and environmental systems interact and adapt. As expressed by the phrase “disciplined interdisciplinarity in transdisciplinary discourses,” he contributes to how different forms of epistemics in different domains of science and society may be interrelated.
Scholz has edited or published more than 40 books and (co-)authored more than 400 scientific papers. Most of these have contributed to environmental and sustainability sciences. However, his work has also contributed to risk and decision research, public health, and the domains of psychology, economics (sustainable finance), organizational sciences, and the didactics of mathematics.
Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity. It draws knowledge from several other fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. It is about creating something by thinking across boundaries. It is related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field, which is an organizational unit that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions emerge. Large engineering teams are usually interdisciplinary, as a power station or mobile phone or other project requires the melding of several specialties. However, the term "interdisciplinary" is sometimes confined to academic settings.
A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.
ETH Zurich is a public research university in Zürich, Switzerland. Founded by the Swiss federal government in 1854, it was modeled on the École polytechnique in Paris, with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists; the school focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, although its 16 departments span a variety of disciplines and subjects.
An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge, taught and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is commonly defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which they belong and the academic journals in which they publish research.
Post-normal science (PNS) was developed in the 1990s by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz. It is a problem-solving strategy appropriate when "facts [are] uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent", conditions often present in policy-relevant research. In those situations, PNS recommends suspending temporarily the traditional scientific ideal of truth, concentrating on quality as assessed by internal and extended peer communities.
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he directs the transdisciplinary research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition" and the Global Brain Institute. He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their problems.
Transdisciplinarity connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline, but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field research method originally developed in anthropology but now widely used by other disciplines. The Belmont Forum elaborated that a transdisciplinary approach is enabling inputs and scoping across scientific and non-scientific stakeholder communities and facilitating a systemic way of addressing a challenge. This includes initiatives that support the capacity building required for the successful transdisciplinary formulation and implementation of research actions.
Neuroinformatics is the field that combines informatics and neuroscience. Neuroinformatics is related with neuroscience data and information processing by artificial neural networks. There are three main directions where neuroinformatics has to be applied:
Daniel Stokols is Research Professor and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Social Ecology in the Departments of Psychology and Social Behavior and Planning, Policy, and Design, and founding dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds appointments in Public Health, Epidemiology, and Nursing Science at UCI. His recent research has examined factors that influence the success of transdisciplinary research and training programs. Additional areas of Stokols' research include the design and evaluation of community and work site health promotion programs, the health and behavioral impacts of environmental stressors such as traffic congestion and overcrowding, and the application of environmental design research to urban planning and facilities design. Professor Stokols is past President of the Division of Environmental, Population, and Conservation Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a Fellow of the APA and the Association for Psychological Science.
The branches of science, also referred to as sciences, scientific fields or scientific disciplines, are commonly divided into three major groups:
An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities, including language, art and cultural studies, and the scientific disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and biology; the social sciences are sometimes considered a third category.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology is a Swiss water research institute and an internationally networked institution. As part of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain, it is an institution of the Federal Department of Home Affairs of the Swiss Confederation. The Eawag is based in Dübendorf near Zurich and Kastanienbaum near Lucerne.
The Science of Team Science (SciTS) is a field of scientific philosophy and methodology which advocates using cross-disciplinary collaboration from diverse scientific fields to solve complex present-day problems. The field encompasses both conceptual and methodological strategies aimed at understanding and enhancing the processes and outcomes of collaborative, team-based research.
Nils-Göran Areskoug, is a Swedish physician, musicologist, composer, author and interdisciplinary scholar. With five academic degrees he is Associate Professor in Transdisciplinary Research at Strömstad akademi, Sweden (2009), and Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (1996).
The social sciences are the sciences concerned with societies, human behaviour, and social relationships.
Wolfgang Kröger has been full professor of Safety Technology at the ETH Zurich since 1990 and director of the Laboratory of Safety Analysis simultaneously. Before being elected Founding Rector of International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) in 2003, he headed research in nuclear energy and safety at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). After his retirement early 2011 he became the Executive Director of the newly established ETH Risk Center. He has both Swiss and German citizenship and lives in Kilchberg/Zürich. His seminal work lies in the general area of reliability, risk and vulnerability analysis of large-scale technical systems like nuclear power plants of different types and complex engineered networks like power supply systems, the latter coupled to other critical infrastructure and controlled by cyber-physical systems. He is known for his continuing efforts to advance related frameworks, methodology, and tools, to communicate results including uncertainties as well as for his successful endeavor in stimulating trans-disciplinary and trans-sectional cooperation to improve governance of emerging systemic risks. His contributions to shape and operationalize the concept of sustainability and - more recently - the concept of resilience are highly valued. Furthermore, he is in engaged in the evaluation of smart energy systems and future technologies, including new ways of exploiting nuclear energy, and cooperative automated vehicles as a cornerstone of future mobility concepts.
The King Carl XVI Gustaf Professorship in Environmental Science is a prestigious, selective appointment awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, to one or two people annually. it began in 1996. Elected Professors spend one year at a Swedish University.
Julie Thompson Klein is a professor and scholar in the field of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University. Klein is widely known as a pioneer in interdisciplinary education, and has consulted widely in academic and other settings in the field. In 2016, she was a speaker at the Centennial Symposium of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. During her 36 years at Wayne state, her publications have been heavily cited.
Lutz Jäncke is a neuropsychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist.
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