Jobst Heitzig

Dr. Jobst Heitzig serves as Senior Scientist and Working Group Leader at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) within the Department of Complexity Science, leading the Behavioural Game Theory and Interacting Agents (BeGa) group and developing the vodle group decision application.

He holds a PhD in mathematics from Hannover University, with prior professional experience at the German National Statistical Office, German Development Bank KfW, and as a freelance statistical software trainer.

His research integrates game theory, complex networks, and climate science to address democratic decision-making, climate coalition formation, and human-nature co-evolution. Key contributions include nondeterministic proportional consensus models for efficient democracy, bottom-up climate coalition frameworks, Moving Taylor Bayesian Regression (MoTaBaR) for data analysis, and power grid stability studies through the EIT Climate-KIC SWIPO project.

His publication trends reveal interdisciplinary synthesis across mathematics, climate policy, and social choice, with influential work in PNAS and Social Choice and Welfare examining free-riding dynamics in climate agreements and consensus mechanisms.

Dr. Heitzig co-leads the copan flagship project on coevolutionary pathways and directs the FutureLab on Game Theory & Networks of Interacting Agents, while previously managing the SWIPO power grid project. He actively organizes international workshops including the SC4AI series on Social Choice for AI Ethics (2023–2025) and delivers lectures on fair voting systems and human-empowerment-based AI.