Speakers

Speakers

Didier Queloz, Nobel Prize in Physics 2019

Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize 2014

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, Economic Sciences Prize 2019 (digital interview – exclusive to the Nobel Prize Teacher Summit*)

Vidar Helgesen, Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation

Parul Sharma, Human Rights Lawyer

Tim Gore, Climate- and Circular Economy Expert

Per Espen Stoknes, Psychologist with PhD in Economics

Maria Gunther, Journalist

Susie Broquist Lundegård, Senior Adviser in Education for Sustainable Development

Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Author and Digital Tool Designer and Developer

Andreas Karlsson, Head of Communication at Stockholm International Water Institute

Michael Alan Martin, Senior Researcher at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute

Frida Berry Eklund, Climate Communications Specialist

Tim Isaksson, Climate Strategist and Nudging Expert

Stefan Swartling, Professor of Global Transformations for Health

Shepherd Urenje, Specialist on Education for Sustainable Development

Ulrika Modéer, UN Assistant Secretary-General (digital greeting)

Nobel Prize Museum Team

Carin Klaesson, Content Manager of Public Programs

Anna Ålander, Museum Educator

Isak Petersson, Museum Educator

Gustav Källstrand, Chief Program Editor

Pontus Thunblad, Acting Education Director

Paulina Wittung Åman, Museum Educator

Didier Queloz

Physics laureate Didier Queloz was born in Switzerland and studied at the University of Geneva. He also received a doctorate there in 1995. His supervisor was Michel Mayor, and their work led to the discovery for which they were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. Queloz has been a professor at the University of Geneva since 2008 and since 2012 also at the University of Cambridge.

Fundamental questions about the universe’s structure and history have always fascinated human beings. In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Using custom-made instruments, they were able to see planet 51 Pegasi b, in the Pegasus constellation. Since then over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found in the Milky Way. Eventually, we may find an answer to the eternal question of whether other life is out there.

Read more here.

Kailash Satyarthi

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee  

One of humanity’s most urgent issues is the reduction of global poverty, in all its forms. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty. It involves dividing this issue into smaller, more manageable, questions. Since the mid-1990s, they have been able to test a range of interventions in different areas using field experiments, for example for improving educational outcomes or child health. For this work they were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019.

Esther Duflo was born in Paris, where her mother was a pediatrician and her father a professor of mathematics. After studying history and economics at the École Normale Superieure and elsewhere, she completed her doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999. Aside from a leave at Princeton University, she has continued to work at MIT. Esther Duflo married her research colleague, Abhijit Banerjee, with whom she also shared the prize in economic sciences.

Read more here.

Abhijit Banerjee was born in Mumbai, India. Both of his parents were professors of economics. After studying at the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, he earned his doctorate at Harvard University in the United States in 1998. He taught at Harvard University and Princeton University before becoming a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he now works. Abhijit Banerjee married his fellow researcher, Esther Duflo, with whom he also shared the prize in economic sciences.

Read more here.

Parul Sharma

Parul Sharma is one of the most influential sustainability experts in Sweden, and is regularly interviewed by media and news channels. In 2017 she was ranked the second most influential sustainability leaders, right after the Minister of Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs. She has written numerous articles and books on topics of CSR and human rights. And between 2020-2022 she has been ranked and awarded most influential in Sweden within areas of social change, development, and human rights. Her most recent three books and handbooks were published by Sanoma Publishers between 2019-2021, all three on Agenda 2030.

Sharma has many years’ experience in the area of sustainability, human rights  and anti-corruption in high risk markets. She is the CEO at the Academy for Human Rights in Business since 2013, which has provided training and legal advise on sustainable development related issues to more than 550 companies – mainly multinational corporations around the world. Between 2016 and January 2018 she chaired the Swedish governmental Agenda 2030 Delegation. She is since 2020 the Chair of Amnesty International Sweden.

Tim Gore

Tim Gore is the Head of the Climate Change and Circular Economy Programme at the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and a former Head of Policy at Oxfam International.

His recent work has focused on global carbon inequality – providing estimates of the unequal responsibility for carbon emissions among individuals in different global income groups – which has been widely cited, including by the UN Secretary General, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Greta Thunberg, among others.

He was a long-time advisor to the Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group at the UN climate change negotiations ahead of the Paris Agreement, and has worked with politicians, major companies and civil society partners on tackling climate change and human rights crises around the world.

Per Espen Stoknes

Stoknes is a TED Global speaker, a psychologist with PhD in economics, and serves as the director of Centre for Sustainability and Energy at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo. An experienced foresight facilitator and academic, he’s also serial entrepreneur, including co-founding clean-tech company GasPlas. Author of several books, among them Money & Soul (2009) and the award-winning book: What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming (2015). His latest books are Tomorrow’s Economy (2021) on MITPress, and Earth For All (2022) with the Club of Rome.

Per Espen has served as member of Norwegian Parliament, and on the EU Commission’s mission board on Horizon Europe’s Climate Change and Societal Adaptation. He has been a central contributor to the Club of Rome’s www.Earth4All.life project.

Maria Gunther

Maria Gunther Axelsson is a writer, journalist and physicist and works as the science editor at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading daily newspaper. In the spring of 2020, she published her second book – Smart. What science says about intelligence. She has a degree in engineering physics, and has been a researcher at the particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva.

In 1998, she received her doctorate in particle physics at Uppsala University. Gunther Axelsson has also worked as an IT consultant and system developer. Between 2010 and 2011, she worked with climate research at the research institute IIASA in Vienna.

In 2006, she published a book about creationism and intelligent design – Big Bang or Let There Be Light. The creation myth as pseudoscience.

Gunther Axelsson is an award-winning public educator – most recently with Karin Gierow’s prize “for dedicated educational activity or knowledge-conveying performance art” from the Swedish Academy.

Susie Broquist Lundegård

Susie Broquist Lundegård has a background as a teacher, outdoor educator, and principal. Now senior adviser and project coordinator in Education for Sustainable Development at World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Together with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund founded Gapminder in 2005. Gapminder’s mission statement is to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based world view everyone can understand.

She designed the user-interface of the famous animating bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world, to understand global development trends. The tool was acquired by Google, and Rosling Rönnlund worked at Google as a Senior Usability Designer from 2007–2010. In 2010, she came back to Gapminder to develop new free teaching material. Rosling Rönnlund is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder. She also sits in the Gapminder Board.

Together with Ola and Hans Rosling, she wrote the book Factfulness, launched in April 2018.

Andreas Karlsson

Andreas Karlsson is head of communication at Stockholm International Water Institute. He previously worked for over 20 years as a journalist, primarily in Africa, covering development and environmental issues. He is the author of the book Vatten – En historia om människor och civilisationer (Water – A story about people and civilisations).

Michael Alan Martin

Michael is a Senior Researcher at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute and an Adjunct Professor at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology. He researches how to promote more sustainable production and consumption systems, primarily related to food and the circular economy.

His main work is with sustainability assessment methods, such as life cycle assessment, which he employs to assess and visualize the environmental impacts to help companies and consumers understand how they can improve their environmental footprints.

Frida Berry Eklund

Frida Berry Eklund is a climate-communications specialist, author of the book Talk to Children About Climate (2020), Head of Operations at Swedish climate-parent organisation, Våra barns klimat and co-founder of the international platform, Our Kids’ Climate.

Våra barns klimat started in 2012 as a call for a more ambitious climate policy. It was a group of ordinary parents who had had enough of far too little being done in politics to tackle the climate crisis. Before the 2014 and 2018 elections, we collaborated with the WWF in the project, the Climate Compass.

The international branch – Our Kids’ Climate was started in 2015 and brings together over 60 organizations from 18 countries. In connection with the climate summit in Paris in 2015, the organization initiated an open letter to negotiators that was estimated to have reached around 500 million people. Today, more than 27,000 people have signed up for a policy that takes the climate goals seriously.

Tim Isaksson

Tim is Head of Research at Nudgd, a Swedish behavioral tech company and consultancy. As a trained climate strategist, Tim is passionate about increasing acceptance for swift and ambitious climate action. As a former substitute teacher and long-time summer camp supervisor, he is passionate about kids’ wellbeing and education in general.

Furthermore, Tim is one of Sweden’s leading experts on nudging, a sub-field within behavioral science for which the American professor Richard Thaler was awarded the economic sciences prize 2018. In his session, Tim will speak about using evidence-based behavioral insights to improve the effectiveness of worthy causes everywhere, drawing upon years pf experience working on sustainability challenges with municipalities, companies and other organizations.

Ulrika Modéer

Ulrika Modéer officially began her role on 20 August 2018 as UNDP’s Assistant Administrator and Director of the Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy. In this role she leads the organization in nurturing and growing key relationships with Member States, and new and emerging partners, as well as lead UNDP’s communications and advocacy, as it works to realize the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Modéer previously served as Sweden’s State Secretary for International Development Cooperation and Climate and has been instrumental in reshaping the country’s international development cooperation to support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.

She combines a strong policy background with parliamentary and civil society experience and has had several assignments in Latin America (Bolivia, Guatemala) and Africa (Mozambique/South Africa).

She holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.