Ernst Florian Winter

Ernst Florian Winter (16 December 1923 in Vienna) is an Austrian-American historian and political scientist.He was married with Johanna von Trapp (1919-1994), one of the Trapp Family Singers, from 1948 to 1994. They had seven children; three sons (one decased) and four daughters.

Ernst Florian Winter has enjoyed three distinct and distinctive careers:

*an academic career
*a diplomatic career and
*a career as a world renowned consultant.

After immigrating to USA in 1938, because of the German-Nazi occupation in Austria, Dr.Winter attended Columbia University where he obtained his M.A. in political science and his P.h.D in Government and International Law at Iona College in New York followed by an Assistant Professorship at Columbia University and a position as Guest Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Princeton University.

In 1961, Austria beckoned, and he accepted the function of Chairman of the Ost-Institute and Professor of International and Communist Affairs in Salzburg. In 1964, Winter became Director and Professor of the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, a position he still holds, while also teaching at the Ford Foundation’s post-graduate Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, and at the International University of Vienna.

A man of many talents including fluency in German, English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, etc, Winters diplomatic career encompasses positions such as:

*Director of the Department of Application of Social Sciences of UNESCO in Paris from 1968 to 1970
*American Negotiator in the People’s Republic of China form 1968 to 1972,
*Member of the team invited by the late Prime Minister Chou En-lai as the first American guest of the Chinese People’s *Institute of Foreign Affairs in 1972 and the Head of two UN specialized agencies missions to China,
*UNEP-FAO (1974) and
*UNEP-WHO (1975).

As a consultant, Winter founded and directed the transnational Research Center for Political Ecology, Environmental Law and Alternative Environmental Technologies in Austria from 1970 to 1978. At the same time, he worked as Senior Consultant for UNEP in Kenya, and was a founding member of the Resources and Industries Associates Group in charge of RIA’s work in agriculture and environmental technologies in New York and Vancouver.

Since 1992, Winter has served as a Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Clean Technologies, and from 1989 to 1994 he also worked as Senior Industrial Development Officer for UNIDO in Vienna.

On 3rd May 2008 he was hounered with the Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer Award by the City of Braunau am Inn.

At the moment he is active in the UN environmental programm "Agriculture in the kosovo".

External links

* C.V. of Ernst Florian Winter [http://www.hrb.at/bzt/doc/zgt/b16/ernstflorianwinter.htm]