Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Karolinska Institutet (KI), the medical university in Stockholm, Sweden. Following studies in statistics and medicine at Uppsala University, Sweden, he served as a district medical officer in northern Mozambique from 1979 to 1981. Besides managing health and hospital service for 360 000 inhabitants he investigated an outbreak of an unknown paralytic disease in a drought stricken rural area. These studies identified a new neurological disease that was named konzo, the local name among the first affect population. During the last 20 years he performed field surveys investigating outbreaks of konzo in famine threaten remote rural areas in five African countries. The causes were traced to a combination of malnutrition and the dietary cyanide from inadequately processed bitter cassava roots that due to hunger were consume without. His research started with analysis of links between poverty, hunger, gender relations and health in small scale farming systems. It now deals with links between health and absolute poverty at both micro and macro level.

Hans Rosling is head of the Division of International Health at KI and leads courses on global health in both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The former includes training periods for Swedish students in India, Iran, Tanzania and Cuba. He has co-authored a textbook on global health and is in charge of the collaborations between KI and universities in low and middle-income countries.

To enable students and researchers to make sense of the world development through improved use of development statistics he has started Gapminder, a non-profit IT- company that is co-owned by KI. Gapminder produce free software that turns boring development statistics into attractive and understandable moving graphics. Gapminder software converts digital numeric time series into interactive animations of countries as bubbles that move with time in a scattergram. The software is developed in collaboration with WHO and UN Statistical Division with funding from the Swedish government. Free software prototypes available from (www.gapminder.org).