Last updated 2026-07-02

Sondre is The Economist’s Senior Data Journalist.

Since starting at the paper in February 2020, his journalism has been cited in thousands of academic publications, and by BBC World News, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Wired, Foreign Policy, Nature, CNN, the UN, WHO, the World Bank and many others. His work has also been the subject of a documentary short by Vox. Upon request, he has advised the WHO on how to model the covid-19 pandemic and the UN on predicting political unrest. His articles regularly rank among the publication’s most read of the year.

Sondre was named Data Journalist of the Year at the 2025 Wincott Awards for his work on climate change, anti-politics and child nutrition. He was also named Data Journalist of the Year at the 2024 Press Awards, for his “pioneering” work using satellites to cover conflict. He has twice won awards for statistical excellence in journalism from the Royal Statistical Society: in 2024 for his work on the climate impact of food, and in 2026 for his article on what baby names reveal about culture. His work uncovering the pandemic’s true death toll won “Innovation of the Year” at the inaugural Future of Media Awards in the autumn of 2022. His covid-19 estimator of death and hospitalisation risk based on age, sex and comorbidities, built in early 2021, has underpinned several peer-reviewed academic studies, and been used by hospitals such as NYU Langone.

Upon invitation, he has given talks to the WHO, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Office, the Pulitzer Center at Columbia University, DataSkup and Coda.br.

Since September 2022, he has been an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Sondre received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2019 for the dissertation “The Political Causes and Consequences of New Technology” (committee chair: Helen V. Milner). The dissertation considered the ways new technologies change countries’ international relations, domestic politics, and economic fortunes. For this and other work, he was in 2018 and again in 2019 awarded the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, for outstanding research in the public interest. As preceptor at the university, he assisted in instruction of statistics and Bayesian machine learning (both PhD level), and international relations (B.A.).

Sondre has studied International Relations (B.A.) at New York University, Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Mandarin Chinese at Peking University. In 2013, he was the inaugural intern of GiveDirectly, a US-based non-profit. Prior to his studies, he served as a conscript in the North Brigade of the Norwegian Army.

He lives in London with his wife Maria and their daughter. He is currently working on a book about thinking.

Contact: sondresolstad@economist.com