At the meeting of the Board of Trustees on 3 June 2025, full membership of the Heinz Nixdorf Institute's Executive Board was confirmed.
Prof Dr Suzana Alpsancar has headed the associated specialist group ‘Applied Ethics with a Focus on Technology Ethics in the Digital World’ at Paderborn University for four years as a junior professor. Since April of this year, she has continued to lead the department under the new name ‘Philosophy and Ethics of Scientific and Technological Cultures’ as a permanent professor, and her full membership of the Heinz Nixdorf Institute's Executive Board has now been confirmed.
Professor Alpsancar's work focuses on the philosophy of digitalisation, mechanisation and epistemological and ethical questions that arise in the course of the development and dissemination of new technologies, such as the use of algorithmic decision-making systems. With her reflections on changing human-technology relationships, she lays theoretical foundations for the description of different types of autonomy and control that arise through new forms of distributed autonomy in human-machine constellations. She is a member of the Informatics Europe Working Group on Societal Impact and Ethics and the committee ‘Experts in automotive and road transport: Assisted, automated, and connected driving’ of the Association of German Engineers (VDI) and its working group ‘Philosophy and Technology’. She has also been working with international colleagues on the project ‘The Cultures of the Cryosphere’ since 2024, which is supported by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council.
Born in Cologne, Prof Alpsancar studied Philosophy, Modern and Contemporary History, German Linguistics and Computer Science at Chemnitz University of Technology, graduating with a Magister Artium in 2006. She then completed her doctorate in philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2010 and has been working at Paderborn University since December 2021.
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