Wittgenstein Prize 2010

WU researcher receives Wittgenstein Award

Wolfgang Lutz, professor at WU’s departments of Socioeconomics and Finance, Accounting and Statistics, has been awarded the 2010 Wittgenstein Award. The €1.5 million prize, also known as the “Austro Nobel Prize”, is Austria’s highest scientific distinction.

Wolfgang Lutz has been at WU since the fall of 2008. In November 2008, he received the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant for interdisciplinary research for his research project “Forecasting Societies’ Adaptive Capacities to Climate Change“. Lutz is the first social scientist to be granted the Wittgenstein Award.

Scientist of high international renown

“It is a great honor for me to receive the Wittgenstein Award”, says Lutz. “Since the field of demographics has long been neglected in teaching and research, I am delighted that WU focuses on this area of academic research”, he adds. Lutz has gained an international reputation through his recent studies on global and Austrian population development. His articles have been published in top journals such as “nature” and “Science”. His research interests include the end of world population growth, the acceleration of global population aging, the persistent decrease in the number of EU citizens, the reactions of different societies to the consequences of climate change, European identity in adolescents, and the positive effects of education on national economic growth.

Development of a research center

Wolfgang Lutz plans to use the prize money to build a "Research Center for International Human Capital" which will be financed by WU and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in close cooperation with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. The project’s goal is to create outstanding research conditions for interdisciplinary demographers and economists, in order to establish a leading research center worldwide.

Apart from his work at WU, Wolfgang Lutz is Leader of the World Population Program for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

Further information:
Cornelia Moll
PR Manager
Tel: + 43-1-31336-4977
Email: cornelia.moll@wu.ac.at