Professor Johan Schot

Technology historian Professor Johan Schot has been appointed as the next Director of SPRU – Science and Technology Policy Research at Sussex. 

Professor Schot has been Professor of History of Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology for the past 14 years. 

He will join SPRU on 1 January 2014, when he will take over from Professor Gordon Mackerron, who is retiring after five years as Director. 

At Eindhoven he leads the Technology, Innovation and Society Group whose research programme on Modern Societies in Transition was evaluated as world-leading in a 2009 assessment of research (published in 2010). 

Professor Schot has founded and directed several large-scale research programmes and networks, securing research grants totalling around 25 million euros. 

He has published several well-cited articles and books about transitions to sustainable development. His latest book, Writing the Rules for Europe, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.   

He spent his early academic career at the University of Twente, completing his PhD there in 1991 and working first as an Assistant Professor (1991-97) and then Associate Professor (1998-99). 

He was made Professor in 1999 and spent the next four years splitting his time between Twente and Eindhoven, before moving to Eindhoven on a full-time basis in 2003. 

In 2009, he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Professor Schot says that he is looking forward to leading SPRU: “I have been following SPRU for many years. I am attracted to its multidisciplinary environment, its commitment to top-level research as well as its sustained contributions to innovation policy and societal debates. 

“The contemporary world faces grand innovation challenges in many areas, including energy, food, mobility and health provision, sustainable development, governance and the effective embedding of new technologies in society. 

“Together they call for a series of transitions. SPRU is well placed to create initiatives which make major contributions to a new world in the making.” 

SPRU is a world-leading centre for research, consultancy and teaching in the field of science, technology and innovation policy and management, and the largest centre of its kind worldwide. In 2012 it was named the UK’s number one science and technology think tank by the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Go-To Think Tank project. Established in 1966, it celebrates its 50^th anniversary in three years’ time. 

Professor Mackerron, who has been Director of SPRU since 2008, says: “I and my colleagues in SPRU are delighted that so eminent a scholar as Johan Schot will be taking over as Director of SPRU on my retirement in the new year. 

“I am sure that, under his guidance, SPRU will continue to flourish into its 50^th anniversary and beyond.”