Sondre Solstad
Senior Data Journalist
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSondre Solstad is The Economist’s Senior Data Journalist and a Harvard IQSS affiliate with nine years’ experience turning complex datasets into influential reporting, models and interactive tools. His work—ranging from a widely used covid-19 excess deaths tracker to a predictive estimator of hospitalisation and mortality risk—has informed peer-reviewed research, major global institutions (WHO, UN), and international media, and won the inaugural Future of Media Award. A Princeton-trained political scientist (PhD) who precepted Bayesian machine learning, he combines formal quantitative methods with production-grade data engineering to ensure robust, auditable pipelines. Beyond journalism, his research on power, trade and technology has been published and presented at top universities and conferences, reflecting a career that bridges academic rigor and public impact. Less obvious: he has hands-on experience in surgical field medicine from service in the Norwegian Armed Forces, an experience that shapes his pragmatic, detail-first approach to high-stakes data work.
9 years of coding experience
Bachelor's degree, International Relations, Summa Cum Laude, Bachelor's degree, International Relations, Summa Cum Laude at New York UniversitySummer Language Study, Mandarin Chinese (Level 2/4 and 4/4), Summer Language Study, Mandarin Chinese (Level 2/4 and 4/4) at Peking UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, International Relations, Formal and Quantitative Methods, Comparative Politics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, International Relations, Formal and Quantitative Methods, Comparative Politics at Princeton University
English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (7)
data-transformation10
data-pipelines10
data-cleaning10
data-pipeline10
r10
data-analysis9
pandas8
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker
Sep 2021 - Nov 2022
Source code and data for The Economist's covid-19 excess deaths tracker
Role in this project:
Data Engineer
Data EngineerContributions:1 review, 71 commits, 2 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Sondre primarily focused on data cleaning and transformation within the project, implementing a function to clean and prepare data from various sources. They modified the cleaning script to handle weekly, monthly, and quarterly data, ensuring data consistency and deduplication. The user also added checks to trigger manual inspection when fewer observations were present and incorporated new datasets, demonstrating a strong emphasis on data integrity and pipeline robustness.
economisttrackerdeathsdata-visualizationexcess-deaths
sondreus/seeAI
Jul 2018 - Apr 2019
Contributions:24 commits, 22 pushes, 1 branch in 9 months
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