He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute[4] and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.

[14] He presented a documentary Don't Panic — The Truth about Population for the This World series using a Musion 3D projection display,[15] which appeared on BBC Two in the UK in November 2013.

[16] In 2015 he presented the documentary Don't Panic: How to End Poverty in 15 Years, which was produced by Wingspan and aired on the BBC just ahead of the announcement of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

[17][18] Rosling was a sword swallower, as demonstrated in the final moments of his second talk at the TED conference.

[19] In 2009 he was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy,[20] and in 2011 as one of 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company.

[23] Rosling spent two decades studying outbreaks of konzo, a paralytic disease, in remote rural areas across Africa and supervised more than ten PhD students.

[24] His work with Julie Cliff, Johannes Mårtensson, Per Lundqvist, and Bo Sörbo found that outbreaks occur among hunger-stricken rural populations in Africa where a diet dominated by insufficiently processed cassava results in simultaneous malnutrition and high dietary cyanide intake.

The provocative presentations that have resulted have made him famous,[9] and his lectures using Gapminder graphics to visualize world development have won awards.

In March 2007, Google acquired the Trendalyzer software with the intention to scale it up and make it freely available for public statistics.

In his posthumous book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think he wrote "The five global risks that concern me most are the risks of a global pandemic, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty.

For instance, in The One-Sided Worldview of Hans Rosling[45] Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, argues that Factfulness, "presents a highly biased sample of statistics as the true perspective on global development, avoids analysis of negative trends, and refrains from discussing difficult issues".

In 2013 in The Ecologist Robin Maynard reported Rosling as raging against the UN's population projections, and against some ecological objections to development: "I don't give a damn about polar bears!

"[46] Hence, Rosling has been criticized as being Pollyannaist about the global political situation in the face of tragedies such as the long-running conflict in Syria, among others.

[9] His work on population growth has also been criticized by Paul R. Ehrlich, the U.S. biologist and Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, and Anne H. Ehrlich, associate director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, in an article, published online by the MAHB, titled "A Confused Statistician."