Dr-Ing Wolfgang Sassin is a German thinker and social reformer. He was born in 1938.
He completed his formal education at the Technical University Munich in 1964 in Technical Physics and Engineering. His professional career started at the National Laboratory in Jülich, Germany in the field of material research and radiation damage. As senior scientist he joined International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis' Energy project. Published in 1980, its report Energy in a Finite World, Paths to a Sustainable Future was the first comprehensive description of the global energy system.
In 1982-1983 Dr-Ing Sassin became a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, where he focussed on the stability of the East-West Duopole by analysing and comparing the civilisational collapse of the Roman Empire and the Chinese Han Dynasty.
His advisory activities and affiliations included the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, the Research Centre Jülich, Germany, the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC, the UN Program Habitat, the Directorate General on Research and Innovation of the European Commission, Brussels, and OEMs in the German automobile industry on man-machine interfaces.
Among his special interests are cognitive processes, in particular the construction of reality based on information provided by personal experience vs. virtual images of the wider environment.
Together with Russian and Chinese professionals Dr-Ing Sassin initiated in 2012 the intercultural project WE? – the dark side of evolution. It focusses on the psychological implications of "man in the billions". The book Evolutionary Environments. Homo sapiens – an Endangered Species? summarises some results of this project. Some of Dr Sassin's pivotal publications in periodicals are summarised in Semantic Scholar.