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Leopoldina elected Prof. Dr Axel Ockenfels as a member

Honor for Cologne economist

The economist Professor Dr. Axel Ockenfels from the University of Cologne is now a member of the "German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina".
Professor Dr. Axel Ockenfels has been appointed as a member of the Leopoldina in the section "Economics and Empirical Social Sciences" of the Leopoldina.

The Leopoldina unites researchers from over 30 countries with special expertise in their respective fields. The election is considered one of the highest honors for male and female scientists. They are elected to the academy in a multi-stage selection process. The criterion for admission is outstanding scientific achievement. 

"Being appointed as a member of the Leopoldina is a great honor and I am very much looking forward to working with you in science and policy advice." Ockenfels says.
 
Ockenfels is a professor of economics in the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne. He studied economics at the University of Bonn and wrote his diploma thesis with the game theorist, mathematician and Nobel Prize winner Reinhard Selten. In 1998, Ockenfels received his doctorate from the University of Magdeburg, where he habilitated in economics in 2002. He has been a professor at the University of Cologne since July 2003. 
His research focuses on game theory, behavioral economics, and market design. In application, he is concerned with the design, testing and implementation of institutions, markets and decision architectures.
Axel Ockenfels received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 2005 for his experimental economic research on human behavior in economic decision-making. In 2018, he was awarded the European Research Council's ERC Advanced Grant, considered the most important funding award in the European research landscape.
From 2003 to 2007, Ockenfels was director of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne. In 2004, he was founding director of the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research. Since 2010, Professor Ockenfels has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. From 2011 to 2018, he was spokesperson for the DFG research group "Design and Behavior - Economic Engineering of Firms and Markets". Since 2015, he has headed the University of Cologne Center of Excellence for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB). 
Ockenfels is also a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the European Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German Academy of Science and Engineering, as well as the joint economic cluster of excellence ECONtribute of the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, which was founded in 2019.