Born 1968 in Munich/Germany, Wolfgang Schweiger owns degrees (M.A., Dr. phil., habil.) in communication studies, political science, and law at the University of Munich. His research interests cover a broad range of issues from corporate communication and evaluation, media use and effects research, online research, risk communication, and empirical methods.
Schweiger is researcher and consultant in corporate communication and evaluation, media development and market research. He was head of the division ‘Computer-mediated Communication’ of the German Communication Association (DGPuK) and editor of the DGPuK e-journal ‘Transfer’ publishing abstracts of excellent German theses in communication studies (www.dgpuk.de/transfer). He works as a reviewer for international (Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Communication Yearbook, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society) and national journals (Publizistik, Medien und Kommunikationswissenschaft, Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie).
1996 to 2000, Schweiger was research assistant at the Institute of Communication Studies and Media Research in Munich/Germany. Winter/spring 2001 he was involved in the e-learning project ‚SYCOM’ at the Institute of Communication Studies and Media Research (University of Zurich/Switzerland). After finishing his doctoral thesis (an empirical study of usage effects of hyperlinks), he was assistant professor at the Institute of Communication Studies and Media Research in Munich. In Winter 2004 Schweiger was visiting professor at the Department of Communication Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/Belgium. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a professor at the Institute of Communication Science at the TU Dresden/Germany. From October 2009, Schweiger will hold a professorship of public relations at the Institute of Media and Communication Science, TU Ilmenau/Germany. He is also director of academic and applied third-party funded projects (An online field-experiment on agenda-setting and learning funded by German Research Association DFG; Web Excellence Forum – benchmarking online corporate communication for more than twenty major European companies).