Katja Mayer is a sociologist and works at the interface of science, technology and society. Since 2019, she is working as senior postdoc with the Elise Richter Fellowship (FWF) at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the interaction between social science methods and their public spheres.

As part of her previous postdoc position at the Professorship of Computational Social Science and Big Data, she studied and taught in the field of “Critical Data Studies” at TU Munich. Her focus is on the cultural, ethical and socio-technical challenges at the interface of computer science, social sciences and society. Data is treated less as a new raw material, but as a highly variable and fragile phenomenon. In the context of data-driven decision-making, data are not considered as “given”, but the way we collect, transform, analyze, and trust data is up for discussion.

In addition, Katja also works as Senior Scientist at the Center for Social Innovation in Vienna and is member of the University of Vienna’s research platform “Governance of Digital Practices”. For many years she has been teaching Sociology, STS and Web Sciences at the University of Vienna, the Danube University Krems, the University of Art and Design Linz and the University of Lucerne. She was a visiting fellow at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (USA). In her capacity as independent expert she is a member of the core team of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) and co-heads the working group “National Strategy for the Transition to Open Science”. In the years 2011-2013 she was research associate of the President of the European Research Council (ERC).