Profile
Professor of Physics.
Complex Networks. Cries over melting snow.
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
Infobaleen allows you to effortlessly sift knowledge from oceans of data and turn it into valuable actions. Martin Rosvall is a founding member of this promising start up company.
The Latest Posts
Check out the latest updates by this IceLabber here
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 [...]
Hive Talk Board: Information games for squirrels with Martin Rosvall
Information games for squirrels with Martin Rosvall Hive Talk Snippet Martin presented a class of information games that include popular board games such as Clue and Battleship. In these games, players compete to uncover information but they must be careful not to reveal too much [...]
Duty before all?
Duty before all? by Martin Rosvall "So, you are on your way home? When I was at your age, I never went home until eight o'clock!" It was only five o'clock when the white-haired professor lectured us in the elevator heading down to the entrance [...]
IceLab’s First Lunch Pitch
Coverage of IceLab's first Lunch Pitch In order to promote meetings between researchers from different institutions and disciplines, Icelab organizes multidisciplinary research presentations with the vision of letting ideas grow and new collaborations arise. The first lunch pitch was held November 14th, 2015, with Martin [...]
Memory in Network Flows
Memory in network flows and its effects on spreading dynamics and community detection The problem In today's connected world, pressing problems call for efficient mapping and modeling of flow pathways – for example how information, people, and different species move through social and biological systems. [...]