Gauden Galea

Dr Gauden Galea is the Director of the Division of Noncommunicable Diseases and Promoting Health through the Life-course, in the WHO Regional Office for Europe. He is a public health physician, who has been at the WHO European Regional Office since January 2011, but has worked for WHO since 1998. He has previously held posts in Suva, Manila, and Geneva as technical officer, regional adviser, and coordinator respectively in areas related to NCDs and Health Promotion. He has contributed to the work on developing a national stepwise approach to NCDs that was first implemented in the Pacific Islands, to the compilation of evidence linking NCDs to the global development agenda that helped bolster the arguments in support of the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs, and more recently to the renewal of life-course approaches to health promotion and public health that is being applied in WHO/Europe to action plans on child and adolescent health, child maltreatment, women’s health, and a forthcoming action plan on men’s health in Europe. He has a great interest in the confluence of technology and public health. He is an avid coder in various programming languages, most prominently Python and R. His answers to programming questions on these two languages have earned him a top 5 percent ranking among the millions of programmers on the question and answer site: StackOverflow http://stackoverflow.com/users/1290420/gauden. He has written various tools, including a Twitter data harvester and mining tool that he uses in personal research https://github.com/ggData/tweetharvest.