Tore Opsahl

Tore Opsahl

I was born in Norway and did most of my schooling there. During my baccalaureate (senior high), I made use of a fabulous opportunity that allowed me to spend the second year (out of three) anywhere in the world. I chose Malaysia – and never regretted it.

After high school, I decided that I should give London a try. I ended up at the newly started Business and Management Centre at Queen Mary, University of London. However, the cold wet of London made me apply to an opportunity to do the second of the three year bachelor in California (Thanks Harry!).

California was a blast! But to cut a long story short, I attended classes at the Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine. It was there, in an advertising class, that me and a couple of friends dreamt up and started ANTfriender. This was Facebook before Facebook: exactly the same idea, but instead of starting at Harvard, we started at UC Irvine and managed to run for 6 months. Shame about that lack of venture capital – no-one in business plan competition had faith in us.

After my degree, I embarked on a PhD at Queen Mary’s School of Business and Management as it then became known. My main focus was networks (basically any system that has interconnected elements). In particular, I have focused on weighted networks. In this type of networks, the ties are differentiated by a weight. For example, in a social network, some people are friends, whereas others are simply acquaintances.

My main aim for this blog is to explore and throw out in the open some of the ideas that I have, but no time to implement.

At the moment, I am working at Imperial College’s Business School with a number of projects related to network science and organisational design. Recently, I joined a project to investigate organisational design for effective prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV-programmes. This is a Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria-sponsored and UNAIDS-convened project that aims to identify areas for improvement in service delivery of treatment programmes.For an updated list of working papers and conference presentations, see the Publications-page.

One of my first academic presentations at Applications of Social Network Analysis 2006 in Zurich. I presented the Valued Clustering Coefficient, which was later published in Social Networks as Clustering in Weighted Networks.