Lars Schöbitz

Lars is a trained environmental engineer, sanitation expert and data scientist with ten years of work experience. As a researcher, he developed methods for quantifying faecal sludge in urban areas and learned how to gain insights from the dirtiest (most unstructured types of) data. He has managed multi-country and interdisciplinary projects in Southern and Eastern Africa, and South-East and South Asia.

As a consultant, his assignments focus on working with data to generate insight. He has supported many clients, including governments, NGOs, private sector entities, and multilateral organisations, as an expert for monitoring and evaluation. A critical assignment was developing methods for indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 (safely managed sanitation) and Goal 6.3 (safely treated wastewater) for the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme.

Today, he spends most of his time as a professional data science educator for the statistical programming language R, with training provided to civil servants in Switzerland and globally in the sanitation sector. He advocates for open government and open science principles with a passion for effective collaboration and computational reproducibility. He likes to crochet, bake, cook, run, play, and code in his free time.