International scientific board (in pdf format)

Werner Arber
Werner Arber was for 25 years Professor of Molecular Microbiology at the Biozentrum, of the University of Basel. He has been Rector of the University of Basel and President of the International Council for Science (ICSU). In 1978, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics.

Paul Boghossian
Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy and Provost Fellow at New York University. He was the Chairman of the Department from 1994 to 2004. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism and the forthcoming Content and Justification: Philosophical Essays. He has written numerous articles on a wide diversity of topics, including color, rule-following, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music and the concept of genocide. He has held research fellowships from several institutions in USA, UK and Australia and has been a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Iris Bohnet
Iris Bohnet is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is the Faculty Chair of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School, serves on the executive committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and on the board of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. A igginsral economist, her research combines insights from economics and psychology and explores the motivational foundations of human behaviour. She has published numerous articles on trust, cooperation, fairness, reciprocity, decision making and negotiation in leading academic journals, typically using an experimental approach and often with a cross-cultural or gender perspective.

Jean-Pierre Changeux
Jean-Pierre Changeux is Professor at the Collège de France and Professor & Chairman of the Department of Neurosciences of the Pasteur Institute, Paris. He is considered one of the fathers of modern neurobiology. In an era of specialization, he is one of the rare scientists who has not only disregarded interdisciplinary boundaries, but in fact bridged them. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Balzan Prize 2001 and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, 1993.

Ruth Dreifuss
Ruth Dreifuss is a former Federal Councillor (i.e. Member of the Swiss Government) and former President of the Swiss Confederation, Switzerland. After having worked as a civil servant in the field of development cooperation and as a leader of the Swiss Labour Union, she was elected by the Parliament one of the seven members of the Swiss Government. From early 1993 to the end of 2002, she acted as Minister of domestic affairs, including public health, research, higher education, social security and other political fields. She acts now in many national and international organizations. She chaired the Commission on intellectual property rights, innovation and public health of the WHO which achieved its report in Spring 2006 and a commission which proposed to the Government of Geneva a new law on the cantonal University.

Gerald M Edelman
Gerald M Edelman is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla (USA) and Founder and Director of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. Gerald M. Edelman is the father of «neural Darwinism», a multidisciplinary theory that combines insights about brain composition, connectivity, structure, function, and evolution. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, 1972 for his seminal discovery of the structure and function of antibodies. Gerald M Edelman published many books, including “Bright Air, Brilliant Fire”, “The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness” and more recently “Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge”.

Richard R. Ernst
Richard R Ernst is Professor Emeritus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, Switzerland. After having received his Ph. D. in Technical Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Richard R Ernst worked with Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California, He returned to the ETH in 1968 where he became Full Professor in 1976. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991, for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.

Gerd Folkers
Gerd Folkers is Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at ETH Zürich and Chairman of the Collegium Helveticum, Zürich, Switzerland. He has been Full Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at ETH Zürich since 1994 and took the Chair of the Collegium Helveticum in October 2004. His scientific interest is interdisciplinarity as a source of “relevant knowledge”. He serves at the executive board of the Division Medicinal Chemistry of the Swiss Chemical Society, and is member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences as well as a member of many international scientific societies.

Georges Haddad
Georges Haddad is the Director of the Division of Higher Education, UNESCO. He holds a PhD in Mathematical sciences and he is “Agrégé en mathématiques” and a University professor, former President of the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, from 1989 to 1994. He was the President of the Board of the World Conference on higher education (UNESCO, 1994-1999) and acts now as the Director of the division of Higher Education of the UNESCO.

Julia Higgins
Dame Julia Higgins is Professor of Polymer Science, Imperial College, London (UK). Besides her many scientific achievements and distinctions, she has been a vociferous advocate of the need for continuous dialogue between science and society and has pioneered exploration of the responsibilities of being a scientist. Dame Julia Higgins was the Scientist in Residence and moderator of the 2006 Crans-Montana WKD
Symposium.

Hiroshi Komiyama
Hiroshi Komiyama became the 28th president of the University of Tokyo in 2005, after serving a year as vice president and a year as executive vice president. Prior to this, he served as the dean of the School of Engineering from 2000 to 2002. He received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral degrees all from the University of Tokyo in chemical engineering. As president, he has initiated new projects to reform the University of Tokyo through endeavours to achieve the 'Structuring of Knowledge' and create 'Autonomous and Decentralized yet Cooperative Systems'.

Helga Nowotny
Helga Nowotny is Vice-President of the European Research Council, ERC, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the University of Vienna and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Wien, Austria. She is Professor em. of Social Studies of Science at ETH Zurich and former Director of its Collegium Helveticum. Among many other positions, she also chaired the European Research Advisory Board, EURAB, of the European Commission and was the Founding Director of "Society in Science: The Branco Weiss Fellowship". Through her work in social studies of science and on social time she has made major contributions to these fields.

Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West is President and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He was a theoretical particle physicist and leader of the particle theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the mid-1990s, his focus shifted from particle to biological physics, studying the most complex of all systems: life. Since then, he has done major work at the confluence of biology and physics, including seminal work on biological scaling.

Frank Wilczek
Frank Wilczek is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He has received many prizes for his work in physics, including the Nobel Prize in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student at Princeton University, when he was only 21 years old. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the exploration of new kinds of quantum statistics (anyons).

Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson is currently the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College Oxford. His work in analytical philosophy of language, logic, metaphysics and epistemology constitutes a very important contribution to these diverse branches of thought. He is the author of several books, including “Identity and Discrimination”, “Knowledge and Its Limits”, “Vagueness” and “The Philosophy of Philosophy” (to be published in late 2007) and of numerous articles. In 1997 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2007).