About Andrew Whitby

I am an Australian data scientist and economist living in New York. I have experience directing data science projects in business, policy, nonprofit and academic settings, spanning the full data lifecycle from collection to visualization. I am particularly interested in technology, creativity, innovation, growth and demography.

Currently I work on alternative data at Bloomberg LP. From 2015—2020, I worked at the World Bank, most recently in the Development Data Group where I was a founding editor of the Atlas of the Sustainable Development Goals and occasionally co-hosted a podcast. (The Atlas team went on to win the Information Is Beautiful award in 2023 in the humanitarian category.)

My previous role at the World Bank was in the organization’s Innovation Labs, helping build a data science community and supporting innovative data projects with planning, data acquisition and modelling. The New York Times covered some of that work.

Prior to the World Bank, I was a Research Fellow at Nesta, the UK’s innovation think tank. I completed my doctoral research in time series methods in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford; my undergraduate degrees from the University of Queensland are in Economics and Computer Science.

My first book, The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations from the Ancient World to the Modern Age, was published in March 2020. The Economist described it as “an entertaining and informative story, more about society than statistics.”

It was also covered favorably by the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal as well as by CBS, WNYC, and numerous other outlets. I have written on the census for the New York Times, Time, and Wired; and joined a panel discussing it on the BBC World Service. I was invited to testify on the census before a public hearing of the New Jersey Assembly Oversight, Reform and Federal Relations Committee.

How to contact me

Email me at me@andrewwhitby.id.au, or find me on Twitter/X, Github or LinkedIn.