European Academy of Sociology - Fellows

Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing

Dirk Helbing has been at ETH Zurich since 2007. He is Professor of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation. Before joining ETH Zurich, he was Managing Director of the Institute for Transport & Economics at Dresden University of Technology, Germany, where he was appointed full professor for Traffic Modeling and Econometrics in 2000. Helbing studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen (D), and completed his doctoral thesis at Stuttgart University (D). For his PhD thesis on modeling social processes by means of game-theoretical approaches, stochastic methods and complex systems theory, he was awarded two research prizes. In 1996, he received a Heisenberg scholarship following the completion of his habilitation on traffic dynamics and optimization. From 1997 on, he spent two years altogether at international research institutions in various countries.

In 2008, Professor Helbing was elected as a member of the prestigious German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). He has organized several international conferences and has edited special issues on material flows in networks and on cooperative dynamics in socio-economic or traffic systems. Professor Helbing has given numerous public talks and published more than 250 papers, including several contributions to high-impact journals like Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). In addition, he heads the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division (Φ·SOE) of the German Physical Society (DPG), is the vice chairman of the ETH Risk Center, and scientific coordinator of the FuturICT flagship project.