Prof. Alexander Gerber

Our research group aims at crossing what is often seen as the divide between scholarship and practice. We are a community of staff and students trying to bring together research and teaching on communication as an agent of social innovation and sustainable system change. We share a vision of trans-disciplinary research that includes a wide range of stakeholders in co-creation. 
Grounded in Prof. Gerber's Research Chair on Artificial Intelligence in Tertiary Education, our research also circles around digital transformation, as in the "Sokrates^t" project. 
A school of thought we have helped to establish, is Evidence-based Science Communication (Jensen & Gerber, 2020), arguing for an improved knowledge exchange between scholarship and practice to make communication more strategic, effective, and inclusive, putting public interests at the heart of how knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in open democratic societies.
Examples for the systemic approach of our work are the first in-depth empirical field analysis of science communication research (Gerber et al., 2020), and our research-led teaching on Corporate Sustainability and Social Innovation.

Over the past few years, the research in our group included several contract-research projects for industry and private foundations, as well as seven EU-funded projects (Horizon 2020 / Horizon Europe), such as the coordination  of the "NUCLEUS" project on anticipatory institutional governance and culture change. Other projects such as RRING, GRRIP, TeRRIFICA and Ô, focused on social innovation and sustainability communication, including highly interdisciplinary forms of participatory design and stakeholder management. The CREATIONS project focused on integrating arts in science education. 
The department also co-hosted Europe's largest Summer School for Science Communication ("STEAM"), originally funded through the Erasmus+ scheme for three years, later transformed into a social enterprise. Based on two DAAD-funded initiatives, we have established a university collaboration with the Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambidia).
Department Chair, Prof. Gerber, has supervised science communication evaluation projects for national and regional governments, in his function as Research Director of the Institute for Science and Innovation Communication (inscico), which is also part of the recently-launched EU Green Deal project AURORA on environmental impacts monitoring for the sustainability transformation. In 2011, Prof. Gerber initiated and coordinated the first "Trend Study" on Science Communication (Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft), followed by another edition in 2018.

Before joining Rhine-Waal University, Prof. Gerber has worked as a science journalist / author / film director, and later became Head of Marketing & Communications at Fraunhofer Group (ICT) for seven years. He also founded and served as editor-in-chief of InnoVisions Magazine. 
Prof. Gerber serves on various Advisory Boards, for instance for the European Food Information Council and the regional chamber of commerce's (IHK) Research & Innovation Committee. 

• Gerber, A. (2023). Editorial: Evidence-based science communication in the COVID-19 era. Frontiers in Communication, 8, 1279202. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1279202.
• Farrugia, D. M., Vilches, S. L., & Gerber, A. (2021). Effective inter-organisational networks for Responsible Research and Innovation and global sustainability: a scoping review. Open Research Europe, 1, 144. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13796.2.
• Jensen, E. A., Jensen, A. M., Reed, M., & Gerber, A. (2021). Evidence-based research impact praxis: Integrating scholarship and practice to ensure research benefits society. Open Research Europe, 1, 137. https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.14205.2.
• Jensen, E. A., & Gerber, A. (2020). Evidence-Based Science Communication. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 78. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00078.

• 01.02.2025 - 31.10.2025 | Tests adaptiver KI-Tutoren für validierte Lernprozesse mit sokratischen Dialogen | Mittelgeber: Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen - MKW | Zum Projekt