Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling is a public speaker on global change, listed by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is a professor and teaches Global Health at Karolinska Institute, the Medical University in Stockholm, Sweden. Through Rosling Education AB, a company co-founded with his wife Agneta, he lectures across the world to widely different audiences. Hans Rosling was trained in Statistics and Medicine in Sweden, and studied Public Health in India in the 1970’s. Working as a medical doctor in a remote part of Mozambique in 1981 he identified a new paralytic disease that was named konzo. His research on similar outbreaks across Africa in the next 20 years linked the disease to hunger and organic dietary toxins. He also studied other links between poverty and health in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and the Academy of Engineering Sciences. He has been adviser to WHO and UNICEF. He initiated “Doctors without Borders” in Sweden, started new courses, and wrote a textbook on Global Health. He is a presenter in two award-winning documentaries for BBC and was awarded The Gold Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in London in 2014. With his son and daughter in-law, he co-founded Gapminder Foundation. Their mission is to fight devastating ignorance about global trends with a fact-based world view that everyone can understand. They do it by producing documentaries, videos and interactive educational material on global change. Most well-know are their moving bubble graphs that convert boring statistics into enjoyable animation. All freely available at: www.gapminder.org . They developed the Trendalyzer software that Google acquired in 2007. Using animations of global trends, Hans Rosling makes trend data on economic, social and environmental changes in the world understood. His award-winning lectures and videos have been labeled “humorous, yet deadly serious”. His main message is that there are no longer two types of countries in the world. The old division into Developed and Developing countries has been replaced by countries on a continuum of social and economic development where most people tend to live in the new middle. With wife Agneta, he founded Rosling Education AB through which he lectures across the world to widely different audiences.