Reception of the Invited Scholar (Dr. CHABAY, Ilan)
Dr. CHABAY, Ilan is a Research Professor of Arizona State University (US).
He brings together natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, and arts to help communities worldwide address complex global change challenges by developing and strengthening inclusive decision-making and implementation. His work draws on three distinct careers. After earning a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago in 1972, he spent 12 years developing novel molecular spectroscopic methods as Research Scientist at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Consulting Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Chemistry. He then became Associate Director of the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, working with founder and director Frank Oppenheimer (1982-1983). From 1983 to 2005, he founded and led a social entrepreneurial company in Silicon Valley that designed and built exhibitions for Disney, NASA, and 230 museums in 16 countries, inspiring curiosity about the world and its rapidly changing conditions. From 2006 to 2011, as Hasselblad Professor of Sociology and Applied IT at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, he shifted to social science research on public learning and understanding of science for sustainability. In 2007, he founded the Knowledge, Learning, and Societal Change International Research Alliance (KLASICA), which he continues to direct. At the Research Institute for Sustainability Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, Germany, formerly IASS, he served as Senior Fellow from 2012 to 2016, Head of Strategic Research Programs from 2017 to 2022, and Senior Investigator on the EU “Real Deal” project from 2021 to 2022. Since 2023, he has been Research Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Global Futures and remains co-director of KLASICA. He has authored more than 100 papers in both social and natural science journals, plus numerous reports, two co-edited books, and three patents. He is an Honorary Member of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) in Kyoto, Japan, a Fellow of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille, France, and a 2025 Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa.
