Gabriela Petrovic
Since January 2000, Gabriela Petrovic is Director General of Statistics Austria, being responsible for financial matters with a strong focus on efficiency since the reorganisation into a federal institute under public law. After graduating in law, Ms. Petrovic subsequently worked for many years as an academic assistant at the renowned Vienna Institute for Employment and Social Law. She then changed from research to practice, starting with a leading position as Personnel Manager of a large retail group and member of the board at a printing and media company, being responsible for all HR and legal issues.
Ms. Petrovic, who was born in Vienna, considers her most pressing challenge to run a management strategy that consistently covers its own costs, the ongoing use of appropriate management systems and the systematic use of effective personnel development measures through which the workforce’s existing potential can be enhanced and harmonised with the organisation’s objective of providing high-quality and efficiently compiled federal statistics.
Tobias Thomas
Tobias Thomas is Director General (Statistics) of Statistics Austria and adjunct Professor of Economics at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. Internationally, Thomas represents Austria in the European Statistical System Committee (ESSC), the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), the United Nations Conference of European Statisticians (UNCES), and the OECD Committee on Statistics and Statistical Policy (CSSP). In 2021, he was also elected by the ESS member states to the Partnership Group (ESS-PG), which provides strategic advice to the work of the ESSC.
Thomas is Vice President of the Austrian Statistical Society (ÖSG), Vice Chair of the Austrian Productivity Council, scientific expert at the Austrian Pension Commission, and member of the High-Level Group on the Strategic Development of the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). In addition, Thomas is member of the Science Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), member of the Committee on Economic Systems and Institutional Economics of the Verein für Socialpolitik, and Fellow at the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) of the Central European University (CEU).
After studying economics at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn and Technische Universität Berlin, Thomas earned his doctorate summa cum laude from the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, where he later also completed his habilitation. Thomas was visiting scholar at, among others, Columbia University in New York (USA) at the invitation of Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph E. Stiglitz and Anya Schiffrin as well as at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich at the invitation of Kai A. Konrad. Thomas regularly presents his research findings at scientific conferences and in scientific journals. Furthermore, Thomas appears regularly in national and international media.