Andrew Whitby

Andrew Whitby is a data scientist who works on innovation, growth and development. He studied economics and computer science at the University of Queensland and received a PhD in econometrics from the University of Oxford, where he was an Oxford-Australia–James Fairfax scholar.

He was appointed a Research Fellow at Nesta, a UK think-tank, before moving to Washington DC to join the Innovation Labs of the World Bank. There, he worked on finding and using unconventional data sets for global development (for example satellite images and cellphone records).

The limitations of such "big data" revived his longstanding interest in traditional statistical surveys such as the census, prompting him to write THE SUM OF THE PEOPLE—his first book.