New Professor of “Designing real-world lab research”

Working together on sustainable solutions: As a professor, Daniel Lang has been dealing with questions of transdisciplinary sustainability research for many years. Now he is setting up a research group at ITAS on “Designing real-world lab research."
Foto von Daniel Lang
New at ITAS: Real-world lab researcher Daniel Lang (Source: Sandra Göttisheim / KIT)

In real-world labs, science and actors from other spheres of society work together on solution options to societal issues, especially in the field of transformation toward greater sustainability. How can these new experimental spaces be designed to provide major insights and produce results that can be transferred to different contexts?

This is one of the questions Daniel Lang has recently been working on at ITAS. The environmental scientist is setting up the research group “Designing real-world lab research” at the institute. His professorship is part of one of a total of four “real-world lab tandems” funded by the German government’s Excellence Strategy.

Real-world lab on autonomous driving

Together with Alexey Vinel from the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Daniel Lang will set up and conduct research in the KIT real-world lab “Autonomous Driving in the Mobility System of the Future” over the next few years. Another focus of the new research group will be to take a comparative look at processes and results of different real-world labs.

Most recently, Daniel Lang taught and conducted research as Professor of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research at Leuphana University Lüneburg. There, he was also Dean of the Faculty of Sustainability (2012-2016) and Delegate of the President for Sustainability (2016-2022), among other positions.

UNESCO Chair “Higher Education for Sustainable Development”

At Leuphana, he currently also holds the UNESCO Chair “Higher Education for Sustainable Development” and is project leader of the “tdAcademy: Platform for transdisciplinary research and studies.” In March 2023, Daniel Lang was elected co-chair of the newly founded “Society for Transdisciplinary and Participatory Research.” At ITAS, Daniel Lang will work closely with colleagues from other research groups, especially from the Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change. (04.05.2023)

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