Dr. Max Roser
Founder and Director
Max is the founder and director of Our World in Data. He began the project in 2011 and for several years was the sole author, until receiving funding for the formation of a team. Max’s research focuses on poverty, global health, and the distribution of incomes. He is also Programme Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at the University of Oxford, and Co-executive Director of Global Change Data Lab, the non-profit organization that publishes and maintains the website and the data tools that make our work possible.
Twitter: @MaxCRoser / Site: MaxRoser.com
Lead researchers
Dr. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
Senior Researcher and Head of Operations
Esteban joined us in 2016. He is a Senior Researcher and Head of Operations at Our World In Data. He is also the executive co-director of Global Change Data Lab, the non-profit organization that publishes and maintains the website and the data tools that make our work possible. Esteban does research on economic development, the public sector, education, and a wide range of related topics. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford (DPhil Economics).
Dr. Hannah Ritchie
Senior Researcher and Head of Research
Hannah joined us in 2017. She is Senior Researcher and Head of Research at Our World In Data. She focuses on the long-term development of food supply, agriculture, energy, and environment, and their compatibility with global development. Hannah completed her PhD in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.
Joe Hasell
Research Project Manager
Joe joined us in 2017. His research focuses on economic inequality, economic growth, and poverty. He is also leading large research projects that require the composition of new datasets. He researched the long-term history of famines and is currently researching the history of poverty and the history of war.
Saloni Dattani
Researcher (Part-time)
Saloni joined us as a researcher in 2021. She has a graduate degree in psychiatric genetics and is working towards a PhD at the University of Hong Kong and King’s College London. She is working with us as a researcher on health-related topics including mental health.
Data management
Edouard Mathieu
Head of Data
Edouard joined us in 2020 as our Head of Data, working on the whole chain of collection, transformation, documentation, and dissemination of our data. He previously worked as a data scientist at the University of Oxford, at the departments of Population Health and Primary Care Health Sciences. He holds a master’s degree from Sciences Po Paris.
Lucas Rodés-Guirao
Senior Data Analyst
Lucas joined us in 2021. He previously worked as a Deep Learning Researcher at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan) and as a Data Scientist for the private sector. He studied a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at UPC (Barcelona, Spain) and KTH (Stockholm, Sweden).
Dr. Fiona Spooner
Senior Data Analyst
Fiona joined us in 2021. She was previously a Turing postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter working on tracking the Sustainable Development Goals and modelling the Covid-19 pandemic. She has a PhD in Ecology and Environment from UCL (London, UK) and an MSc in Conservation Science from Imperial College (London, UK).
Web development
Ernst van Woerden
Head of Product Design
Ernst joined us in 2020. He is a designer at the intersection of data and storytelling. Over the past 11 years, he has explained complex startup technology using explainer animations, designed interfaces to help diabetes patients make sense of their health data, worked on the storyline of product launch keynotes at Xiaomi, and tried to give job seekers insight into their salary.
Dr. Lars Yencken
Technical Team Lead
Lars joined us in 2021 as our Technical Team Lead, helping us to evolve our engineering and data visualisation practices. He previously led tech and data teams in consumer health at Grace Health and Lifesum in Stockholm, and holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Melbourne.
Daniel Bachler
Principal Software Engineer
Daniel joined us in 2021. Previously he worked on scientific data management and visualisation solutions in the life sciences. He studied film directing and now focuses on applying both his engineering and creative background on improving our visualisation tools.
Matthieu Bergel
Senior Software Engineer
Matthieu joined in 2019 and has the overall mission of providing readers with a flowing experience between data and research throughout the publication. Drawing on his consulting experience from communication agencies in Paris, he is now building the next iteration of our content management system.
Operations and Strategy
Valerie Rogers Muigai
Strategy and Operations Manager
Valerie joined us in 2021 as Strategy and Operations Manager. She has over a decade of experience in international development and social enterprise in East Africa and is the founder of Kijani Uganda. She recently completed an MBA at Oxford Saïd Business School.
Advisors
Jason Crawford
Software Team Lead (Part-time Advisor)
Jason Crawford is the former CEO and co-founder of Fieldbook, and has been an engineering manager at companies including Amazon and Flexport. He is the author of The Roots of Progress, where he writes about the history of technology and industry.
Support
Former team members
A list of our former team members and contributors can be found here.