Acting Director General
IIASA
Wolfgang Lutz is the Interim Deputy Director General for Science of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He will be assuming the role of IIASA Acting Director General throughout the month of November 2023.
In addition to the various roles he has filled at IIASA over the years, Lutz is the Founding Director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a cooperation between IIASA, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
He is a leading academic in the field of population and sustainable development and was one of the scientists appointed by the UN to write the Global Sustainable Development Report 2019 titled, The Future is Now. He has won numerous prestigious awards including the Wittgenstein Prize, two European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants, the Mattei Dogan award of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), and most recently, the Science Prize of the Austrian Research Association. He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy Leopoldina, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Finnish Society for Sciences and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. He also serves as special advisor to the Vice-President of the European Commission, Dubravka Suica.
Lutz has published over 293 scientific articles and chapters in refereed books, including 24 in Science, Nature, and PNAS, and wrote or edited 27 books and special issues on international population trends with a special focus on population forecasting, population-development-environment interactions, and on introducing education as a standard demographic dimension in addition to age and sex. He holds a PhD in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania, USA.