Last updated 2025-07-15

Sondre is The Economist’s Senior Data Journalist. He writes data-driven articles, as well as models, algorithms and simulations.

Since starting at the paper in February 2020, his journalism has been cited in thousands of academic publications, by BBC World News, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Wired, Foreign Policy, New York Magazine, Politico, Nature, The BMJ, National Geographic, New York Magazine, CNN, the UN, WHO, World Bank, in the annual lecture of the Royal Medical Society in the UK, and by many others, and been made the subject of a documentary short by Vox. Upon request, he has advised the WHO on how the model the covid-19 pandemic and the UN on predicting political unrest and on data strategy.

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 is currently shortlisted for Specialist Journalist of the Year at the 2025 British Journalism Awards (winners to be announced in December 2025). His work on the climate impact of food won the 2024 data visualisation award for statistical excellence in journalism from the Royal Statistical Society. For his work uncovering the pandemic true death toll, he won the “Innovation of the Year” category at the inaugural Future of Media Awards in the fall of 2022. His covid-19 estimator of death and hospitalisation risk based on age, sex and comorbidities, built in early 2021, has been used as the basis for several peer-reviewed academic studies, and used by e.g. NYU Langone.

Upon invitation, he has given talks to the World Health Organisation, the United Nations General Secretary’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, which is dedicated to solving society’s greatest challenges through bold and collaborative social science.

Sondre’s received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2019 for the dissertation “The Political Causes and Consequences of New Technology” (committee chair: Helen V. Milner). He here considered the ways new technology 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 the Fall of 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.

Contact: sondresolstad@economist.com