Profile
From flows of money between banks or ideas among scientists to pandemic outbreaks and range shifts of species, Martin Rosvall’s research focuses on developing methods for revealing the inner workings of interconnected systems to answer questions in various areas of science.
Martin was born in Uppsala and grew up north of Umeå. He went to a high school for cross-country skiing in Lycksele before his undergraduate in engineering physics. After his Ph.D. in network science at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Martin moved to the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle for his postdoc. There he started working on a grand challenge in network science: how to simplify and highlight essential regularities in networks into maps. Mapping networks is a holy grail of data science because in the myriad links and nodes of a network hide answers to how we can predict how the system will evolve.
From 2009 at Umeå University, Martin has continued to develop and integrate new math, algorithms, and visualizations into powerful mapping tools for efficiently going from interaction data to insightful maps, new hypotheses, and unexpected discoveries. With a thriving research group in IceLab and a growing collaboration network, the applications now extend across both the natural and social sciences.
As a professional power napper, Martin’s favorite place in IceLab after lunch is a hidden couch.
Martin lives between the university and the ski trails with his wife Marie Halén and their two daughters born in 2014 and 2018. When he is not playing with his family, you will find him increasing his dopamine levels on cross-country skis.
In 2014 Martin received the Nordea Science Prize and in 2018 the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics.
Map Equation
Martin Rosvall’s site MapEquation.org houses a number of applications based on the map equation.
Infobaleen
Martin Rosvall is a co-founder of the university spin-off Infobaleen. For the many organizations struggling to understand and use their data, Infobaleen develops flexible tools that help them go from data to insights and valuable actions.
The Latest Posts
Check out the latest updates by this IceLabber here
The 11th IceLab Camp exceeded the participants’ expectations
The 11th IceLab Camp exceeded the participants’ expectations Making up projects from random keywords. Communicating ideas through drawings. Writing an interdisciplinary research proposal. Learning to listen to and ask questions. Last week 18 local and international researchers at different career stages (MS, PhD and Postdoc) and from [...]
Erik Morrow
Meet Erik Morrow Erik Morrow is a Master's student working on a project with Martin Rosvall on the Map Equation website How did you come to be in IceLab? I first met Martin Rosvall a few years ago when he was [...]
Gradual changes triggered historical shift in marine fauna
Gradual changes triggered historical shift in marine fauna Large asteroids or comets hitting Earth, massive volcanic eruptions and other single, deadly events are usually the focus for scientists seeking to reconstruct Earth’s past mass extinctions. In a new study, researchers from Umeå University and the University [...]
Finding a new way to uncover targets for future antibiotics
Finding a new way to uncover targets for future antibiotics How do you take great ideas and turn them into innovative research? In this case the Integrated Science Lab, IceLab, offered up some help in the form of funding for a postdoc who could act as [...]
The distribution of vertebrate animals redefines temperate and cold climate regions
The distribution of vertebrate animals redefines temperate and cold climate regions The distribution of vegetation is routinely used to classify climate regions worldwide, yet whether these regions are relevant to other organisms is unknown. Umeå researchers have established climate regions based on vertebrate species' distributions in [...]
Rare species survive in ghettos
Species of animals and plants with low abundances organize in ghettos to survive Similar to the organization of human cities, animal and plant communities have ghettos or ethnic neighborhoods, where low-abundant species group to enhance their persistence against more competitive species. This [...]