Social Programme

Cornelia Betsch is professor of health communication at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She is a trained psychologist. Her work aims at understanding principles of health behavior by applying a judgment and decision-making and strategic-interaction perspective to infectious disease control – especially with regard to the vaccination decision, emerging infections and prudent use of antibiotics. Her team, the Psychology and infectious Diseases Lab, develops techniques and tools to improve an unbiased vaccination decision, for example by debunking vaccination myths or countering vocal vaccine deniers. Cornelia’s credo is that research should aim at high understanding of the issue and, at the same time, high usability of the results. Therefore, she works with national and international health organizations to transfer research into practice and to foster evidence-based, behavioural insights-related decisions. Her research is funded by independent bodies.

Astrid Dannenberg is Professor of Environmental and Behavioral Economics at the University of Kassel. Her research focuses on human decision making, the drivers and barriers of cooperation, and how institutions can be designed to promote cooperation. Astrid received her MA in economics at the University of Mannheim and her PhD at the Otto-von-Guericke-University of Magdeburg. She previously was a Research Fellow at the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, the University of Gothenburg, and Columbia University in New York City. In 2014, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council for her research project “Human Cooperation to Protect the Global Commons” (HUCO). Astrid has served as Council Member of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economics (EAERE) from 2016 to 2019 and is an Editorial Board Member of the journals Economic Inquiry and Environmental and Resource Economics. She has been appointed as a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg from 2020 to 2022.

Andreas Diekmann is a Seniorprofessor at the University of Leipzig (2018 -). He was a Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich (2003 – 2016) and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (2017 – 2018). He earned a doctoral degree from the University of Hamburg in 1979 (Dr. rer. pol.), and received the “venia legendi” (Dr. rer. pol. habil.) from the University of Munich (1987). His areas of research are social cooperation and experimental game theory, environmental and population sociology, and methods of empirical social research. He became an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, in 2001 and served as a chairman and senator of the section “Economics and Empirical Social Sciences”. He is also a fellow of the European Academy of Sociology and co-editor and board member of several professional journals and research institutions. Current research activities focus on the reduction of energy consumption, the analysis of the environmental burden of metropolitan areas with geo-referenced panel data and on experimental research on social norms, cooperation, and social dilemma games.

Dinner and social event