Igor Rudan (born 7 March 1971) is a Croatian-British scientist and writer. He has conducted research in global health and genetics, wrote popular science books translated in several languages, and developed a documentary series on global health. He is also the founder of the field of ideometrics - the science of generating, measuring and prioritising ideas.
Igor Rudan is a medical doctor with master's degrees in Anthropology and Epidemiology, as well as PhD degrees in Public Health and Genetic Epidemiology.Rudan I: Ancestral kinship and cancer in the island of Lastovo, Croatia. M.P.H. thesis. Universita di Pavia; Pavia, 1999.Rudan I: Rak u stanovništva s visokim stupnjem srodstva. Magistarski rad. Prirodoslovno-matematički fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu. Zagreb, 1997.Rudan I: Izonimija kao rizik za rak. Doktorska disertacija. Medicinski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu; Zagreb, 1998. As of January 2026, he has published more than 700 research articles and 18 books. Based on Google Scholar, he has received more than 290,000 citations and has an H-index of 208.
Early life and education
Family Igor Rudan was born in 1971 in Zagreb, Croatia, then a city of Yugoslavia. His father, Nikola Rudan, was a surgeon at the Institute for Tumors and Allied Diseases in Zagreb. Rudan's mother, Tatjana (née Valić), was a concert pianist. His sister, Mirna Rudan Lisak, is a Croatian author of books and essays on art and culture and a senior advisor at the Zagreb City Office for Culture. His uncle, Pavao Rudan was an anthropologist and a Croatian scholar who later became Secretary-General of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Rudan's grandfather, Mario Rudan, was a judge on the Croatian Supreme Court, while his grandmother, Lucija (nee Perinic) was a schoolteacher and a renowned poet whose work was used as a basis for Dalmatian folk songs and theatre plays. The Rudan family originates from the village of Bogomolje on the island of Hvar, Croatia.
Education
Primary School From 1977 to 1985, Igor Rudan attended Veljko Vlahović Primary School on Krajiška Street in Zagreb. During this time, he participated in state championships in mathematics, physics, and chess, as well as city championships in swimming and athletics.
Secondary School In 1985, he enrolled at the High School for Mathematics and Computer Science (MIOC) in Zagreb, now the "XV gymnasium", where he excelled academically.
Through the 'Open Door' exchange program, Igor Rudan completed his senior year of high school in the United States. From 1988 to 1989, he attended West Charlotte High School, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
University education
University In 1989, Rudan returned to Zagreb to study medicine at the University of Zagreb Medical School. He studied during the period of the Homeland War in Croatia (1991-1995) and obtained a degree of Medical Doctor (M.D.) and winning a number of awards. He also engaged in cancer research with his father, Nikola Rudan, and with Professor Marija Strnad, the head of the Cancer Registry of Croatia. This collaboration resulted in more than 20 research papers, case reports, and case series published by them between 1992 and 1995. He led this research as a medical student, publishing the results in journals Libri Oncologici and Acta Medica Croatica. He graduated from medical school in 1995.
During his medical studies, Rudan was awarded the Annual Award from the Principal (Rector) of the University of Zagreb for the best student scientific article in the academic year 1992/93 and 1993/94. He was also awarded the Scholarship for the 50 most successful students from the University of Zagreb in 1993 and 1994 and the Scholarship of the City of Zagreb for the 20 most successful students in 1994. Later in 1994, he received the main Award for Presentation at the annual conference of the European Medical Students Association (EMSA) in Prague, Czech Republic.
Postgraduate He continued his postgraduate education at the University of Zagreb. Mentored by Dr Branka Janicijevic from the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, he obtained a Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree from the University of Zagreb in 1997. This was for the study of the effects of consanguinity and inbreeding on cancer incidence in Croatian island isolate populations. A year later, in 1998, he obtained the Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree from the University of Zagreb Medical School. Mentored by Professor Silvije Vuletić from the Andrija Štampar School of Public Health, he studied the effects of isonomy and ancestral kinship on cancer in a remote island of Lastovo, Croatia, based on the reconstruction of genealogies for six generations of the local population.
In 1999, he joined the European School for Advanced Studies at the University of Pavia, Italy. Mentored by Professor Nadia Ranzani, he obtained a Master's degree in Public Health (M.P.H.) for a genetic epidemiological analysis of familial clusters of cancer on the island of Lastovo, Croatia. In 2000 and 2001, he received the British Scholarship Trust (BST) Fellowship, Overseas Research Scheme (ORS) Fellowship, and the Ph.D. fellowship from the University of Edinburgh. This allowed him to move to the United Kingdom and complete his Ph.D. in genetic epidemiology in 2005. Mentored by Professor Harry Campbell, he studied the effects of inbreeding and consanguinity on human quantitative traits and complex common diseases of late-onset.
Career In his early career, Rudan developed a biobank in the isolated island populations of Croatia ("10,001 Dalmatians"). He co-led the study that first identified associations between SLC2A9 genetic variants, uric acid levels, and gout. He identified variants that regulate human protein N-glycosylation and predispose a person to autoimmune diseases and cancers. Rudan also co-authored 14 Nature and 75 Nature Genetics papers that assigned biomedical function to more than 2,000 human genetic variants.
In his later career, he focused on international health efforts to reduce global child mortality as a member of the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG). He served as a consultant of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, Save the Children, and other organizations. He developed the "CHNRI" methodology (in 2006) and EQUIST tool (in 2012). Both have been used by international agencies to prioritize investments in global health research and interventions, respectively. The wide application and methodological improvements of the CHNRI process over two decades have led Igor Rudan to propose, together with Sir Aziz Sheikh, the new field of science called ideometrics - the science of generating, measuring and prioritising ideas.
He presently works as a professor of international health and molecular medicine and joint director of the Centre for Global Health and World Health Organization's Collaborating Centre for Population Health Research and Training at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the President of the International Society of Global Health, co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Health, and visiting professor at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom He also completed a Global Public Health Leadership Program at Harvard University, USA, in 2025. As of January 2026, he has published more than 700 research articles and 18 books. Based on Google Scholar, he has received more than 290,000 citations and has an H-index of 208. He also received more than 30 awards and recognitions for his work.
Career in genetic research After obtaining his first doctorate in 1999, Igor Rudan started to develop the biobank called "10,001 Dalmatians". At the time, this was a very rare DNA-based human biobank in a middle-income country. This resource for genetic epidemiological studies was established in a series of genetic isolate islands off the coast of Dalmatia region in Croatia. In 2001 he received the International Research Development Award from the Wellcome Trust for his research and vision. Further development of this biobank was achieved through collaboration with Professors Harry Campbell from the University of Edinburgh and Alan F. Wright from the Human Genetics Unit of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Edinburgh.
The outbreeding theory: Studying the effects of human inbreeding and admixture Rudan's early work focused on studying the effects of inbreeding and admixture on human health and disease. At the time, in the early 2000s, one of the central questions relevant to gene mapping was to predict the genetic architecture of complex quantitative biological traits that underlie common late-onset diseases. Most research of that period assumed that it was "oligogenic", i.e., that only a handful of genes would confer the majority of genetic risk for complex quantitative traits and diseases. Using inbreeding studies within his PhD research, Rudan and his colleagues showed that the genetic architecture of those traits must be highly polygenic, with at least several hundred loci contributing to the genetic risk of human hypertension and late-onset diseases.
These studies, published in 2003, were regarded as controversial at the time, which made them difficult to publish. Their implications were summarized in a review published by the influential scientific journal Trends in Genetics in 2003. A decade later, hundreds of genome-wide association studies have shown that the genetic architecture of human quantitative traits and common complex disease of late-onset is highly polygenic. Rudan's work on studying the effects of inbreeding and admixture on human disease was continued at the University of Edinburgh through the PhD theses by Ozren Polasek, Ruth McQuillan, and Peter Joshi. After 16 years of continuous research, it resulted in a paper in Nature, demonstrating effects on stature and cognition in diverse human populations. Based on these results, Rudan proposed "the outbreeding theory", i.e., that large human movements, migrations and urbanization may be partly driving, through so-called "hybrid vigor", the observed secular trends, improvements in public health indicators and human lifespan.Rudan I: Effects of inbreeding on human quantitative traits and common complex diseases of late-onset. Ph.D. thesis. The University of Edinburgh; Edinburgh, 2005.
10001 Dalmatians: Genome-wide association studies of quantitative traits Rudan developed the resource "10001 Dalmatians" with the help of his close collaborators Harry Campbell and Ozren Polašek. The biobank mainly comprised the examinees from the islands of Vis and Korčula in Dalmatia, Croatia. With the advent of "chips" for genome-wide scans developed by the company Illumina, genome-wide association studies became possible and the Croatian resource was among the first to carry them out. However, due to the highly polygenic nature of the studied traits, gene discovery required very large sample sizes. This led to many European and global biobanks joining together to form large collaborative consortia. Their work led to hundreds of original research papers, many of which were published in the leading science journals - Nature, Science or Nature Genetics.
In collaboration with other international biobanks, the "10001 Dalmatians" resource contributed to the discovery of several thousands of human genetic variants that were associated with quantitative biological traits and complex diseases. Igor Rudan co-led the discovery of the SLC2A9 gene variants that were associated with uric acid levels and gout disease. In collaboration with Professor Gordan Lauc from the University of Zagreb, he also co-led the first two studies that identified genetic variants associated with human N-glycans levels.
Career in global health