Short CV

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Dr. phil Karlheinz Steinmüller is scientific director and founding partner of “Z_punkt GmbH – The Foresight Company” at Cologne and Berlin (www.z-punkt.de). As project manager he is engaged in futures studies for large, mostly German, enterprises and public administrations (European Commission, ministries …). His special fields of expertise include innovations in companies and society, technological foresight and technology assessment, scenario development and wild cards. He has also done research into the history and methodology of foresight.

Karlheinz Steinmüller has published several books on futures studies and many research reports as well as papers on quite different topics like foresight methodology, counterfactual history, futures studies and science fiction, prospects of the cyberspace etc. Besides that, he has much experience as keynote speaker.

Steinmüller is collaborating in the Collège Européen de Prospective Territoriale / European Millennium Project Initiative and in the committee on foresight methodology of the Netzwerk Zukunftsforschung. For the time being, he is member of the Program Committee "Infrastructure" of the German Space Management.

In former times, he was member of the Advisory Board of the European Futurist Conference Lucerne, of the Advisory Board of the 2bahead-Zukunftskonferenz, and of the EU Expert Group "Global Europe 2030/2050". For one election period, he was chairing the International Advisory Board of the Finland Futures Academy.

Background

As researcher and project manager at the Secretariat for Futures Studies at Gelsenkirchen, Steinmüller did from 1991 till 2001 research on methodological foundations of futures studies and worked on scenarios for Russia and future developments of the information society.

From 1982 to 1990 Steinmüller was free-lance writer and published together with his wife Angela Steinmüller three science fiction novels, lots of stories, some radio plays and essays. A. and K. Steinmüller are winners of several national and European literary awards. From 1977 to 1982, Steinmüller was engaged in mathematical modelling, computer simulation, and control of ecosystems at the East German Academy of Sciences (Institute for Cybernetics and Information Processes).

Steinmüller, born in 1950 at Klingenthal/East Germany, studied physics (diploma on theoretical solid state physics in 1973) and obtained the PhD in 1976 for a philosophical thesis on reductionist approaches in biology (“Machine Theory of Life”).