Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer

STS Department Head

Associate Professor for Innovation Research
Program Coordinator, M.A. RESET

Sebastian Pfotenhauer is the Co-Director of the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) and Carl von Linde Associate Professor for Innovation Research at Technical University of Munich. An MCTS and innovation policy scholar, he heads the Innovation, Society and Public Policy group co-located at MCTS and the TUM School of Management. Sebastian’s research interests include regional innovation cultures and strategies, the governance of emerging technologies, co-creation and responsible innovation practices, sustainable mobility transformations, and the critical political economy of innovation.

Sebastian is the coordinator of the Munich Cluster for the Future of Mobility in Metropolitan Regions (M Cube), a EUR 50 Million flagship initiative on sustainable mobility innovation, and serves as the coordinator of the EU-Horizon2020 project SCALINGS (“Scaling up co-creation: Avenues and Limits for Integrating Society in Science and Innovation”) – a EUR 4 Million European investigating use of new collaborative innovation formats such as living labs and pre-commercial procurement in robotics, autonomous driving, and urban energy systems. He has also been the PI on several DFG funded, e.g. on Regional Innovation Cultures, Europe-making through research and innovation, and Technoscientific Constitutionalism.

Before joining TU Munich, he was a research scientist and lecturer with the MIT Technology & Policy Program as well as a fellow at the Harvard Program on Science, Technology and Society. He has served as consultant on innovation policy to various regional and national governments, as well as for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, France. His work has appeared, among other outlets, in Social Studies of Science, Research Policy, Nature, and Issues in Science and Technology. He holds an S.M. in Technology Policy from MIT, a PhD in Physics from the University of Jena, Germany, and has received post-doctoral training in MCTS and public policy at Harvard and MIT. In his spare time, Sebastian enjoys playing the violin, spending time in Mexico, and reading (for fun).