With more than 25-years of experience, renowned TV journalist and presenter, Kristina zur Mühlen has moderated and anchored over 5’000 news and science shows on public broadcasting programs, and live events.
In 1993, after embarking on a diploma in Physics in Jena, Kristina zur Mühlen began her career as a TV journalist and then in 2002 as a presenter. Her first moderating post was with public broadcaster NDR for a regional news show entitled ‘Hamburg Journal’, followed by the regional news show ‘Lokalzeit aus Aachen’ in 2006, and then, her first science show entitled ‘Q21’, both with WDR. However, her regular appearance as one of the main news anchors at nationwide most-known TV prime news ‘tagesschau’ and ‘tagesschau24’ at ARD is doubtlessly the most remarkable milestone in her long-year career as a professional speaker.
7 Topics – 7 Food for thought
In her lecture, Kristina zur Mühlen takes up the currently much discussed topics:
- Living space city: Quality of life in a confined space
- Digitization: Will robots take jobs away from us?
- Sustainability: The end of the throwaway society
- Mobility: New concepts to combat traffic jams
- Culture of mistakes: Our handling of mistakes blocks creativity
- Children: How we prepare them for the future
- Society: The amazing potential of the friendliness chain
With her science background, Kristina zur Mühlen’s passion is a never-ending quest for exploring the answers to the fundamental questions of life, nature and the very essence of science; both of the natural and manmade. She understands her audience and crafts her abilities to draw their attention to even the most demanding of topics. Her unique presentation style, along with her authentically warm personality, engages and entertains her audiences. Not rarely she injects her witty humor and smart jokes, using her expertise and her own reporting style to simplify complex topics and make academic facts even entertaining, interesting and easy to understand. This was the case of the well-known ZDF / 3sat science program ‘nano’, in which Kristina served for ten years as the main presenter. Also on stage, where she has entertained her audiences for over 16 years with topics like future mobility, urban development, sustainability, health, robotics and of course education.
The future of children is significantly important to Kristina zur Mühlen. Not only because she is a mother of a child herself, but also as an ambassador of the Peter Ustinov Foundation, she supports various projects that promote educational development and foster natural creativity of children. With her further roll as an ambassador for children’s protection at GESPCAN, the German Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, she also contributes her work to the Hamburg Foundation ‘Phönikks’ – Families Live with Cancer.
Kristina zur Mühlen Lecture abstract
Kristina zur Mühlen: “What kind of future do we want to live in? Thoughts about a changing world”
Imagine your future, a time when you have grandchildren. And most likely when they come to visit you, or you them, and they’ll ask that age-old question; ‘Grandma… Grandpa… what was it like when you were my age?’ In answering, you’ll begin to reminisce about the past. You may tell them about your vinyl record collection, audio cassette tapes and your CD & DVDs, too. You’ll remember how you used to queue in front of a phone booth, waiting for your turn to use the public telephone. Or how you wrote letters using a pen and paper, and that you needed to go to the library to get and read ‘real’ books! You may also ponder on how you had to buy a film cartridge to stick into your camera to take photos… then send that same cartridge to a photo developer to get your pictures printed! You’ll also recall how you need folding paper maps for directions for when you went on your travels & road trips. And of course, you’ll tell of how you paid with bills and coins which you even needed to withdraw physically from an ATM. You may even recollect how you had to open your front door to your house with a metal key and turn your home lights on and off with a physical switch. And don’t forget to mention that you had to clean your windows manually, vacuuming the floor and mow your lawn… Since back then, household robots did not exist! You stop… then think of what stories your grandchildren will be telling their grandchildren? How will people live 20, 30 or 50 years from now? We can only imagine! At an unprecedented pace, progress inevitably forges forward. Sometimes this scares people who are not yet adjusted to, or maybe even unwilling to be a part of those constant advancements.
Kristina zur Mühlen supports those viewers to get a better grasp of today’s technology, exhibiting how to evaluate these innovations from different angles to find out what are possible and alternative ways to harness their potential for a better tomorrow. Although no one can predict what the future holds, but only that change itself will come. As time waits for no one! Her vital message is; the further you look back into the past, the more you can see into the future, too! Kristina’s vision is of hope, opportunity and prosperity for those who are willing to explore with her, the endless possibilities and excitement that new technologies and science offers.
One of the most important topics of Kristina zur Mühlen has been the influence of the digital transformation of the last two decades. Although ‘history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes’ and sees often the same pattern. She recognizes that today’s innovations will determine and shape the future dominantly. With those credo, she skillfully prods her audience with thought provoking concepts, ideas and questions to help them bridge the gap among what once was, what today is and also yet unforeseeable “still-to-comes.” She inspires her audience to look forward to such wonderful prospects which these new revolutionary applications have to offer us.