[3] She is known for founding the Vienna School of Social Ecology and for her pioneering work on the widely used metric for material and energy flows[4] to complement economic accounting.
Fischer-Kowalski was born 1946 in Vienna as the daughter of the political activist Ruth von Mayenburg and the politician and writer Ernst Fischer.
She received her PhD in sociology at the University of Vienna in 1971 and a postgraduate degree in social sciences from the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1973.
[11] Fischer-Kowalski's research interests cut across various disciplines (among them Sociology, Economics, Biology, Energetics, History), where she is seeking for interdisciplinary insights and solutions in team collaborations.
[11] Her main achievements consist in establishing theoretical foundations and a core set of empirical work in the field of Social Ecology [20][21][22][23][24] on the one hand and developing internationally accepted methodological standards and standardized data bases for material and energy flow accounting (within the European Union and Japan, and recently on a global level).