1. The author

My name is Marcello Vittorio Ferrada de Noli. I am a Swedish Professor Emeritus of Public-Health Epidemiology and PhD in psychiatry (Medicine doktor i ämnesområdet psykiatri, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden). I was previously Research Fellow at Harvard University and Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. My earlier subjects were Philosophy (Profesor de Filosofía, degree) and Psychology (Professor of Psychology, University of Chile, Arica, and of Psychosocial Methods, University of Concepción). As Professor emeritus I have been engaged lately as Senior Advisor (epidemiology) at the Dept. of Immunology, Stockholm University with lecturing at the Poverty Related Diseases (PRD) postdoc program in Africa. From 2006 – 2012 I was consecutively appointed by the Swedish government as alternative member of the Ethical Review Committee for Research in Uppsala.

I was born in Chile in family of Italian ancestry, was a founder of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), and after been liberated from Pinochet’s Prisoners Camp at Quiriquina Island I received a Geneva-Convention political asylum in Sweden. My political views are Left Liberal and social-libertarian. I am also the publisher of Libertarian Books – Sweden, and a painter-artist. About my  research findings, art production, bio aspects, etc.; further information here. I have been a Swedish citizen nearly all my adult life,  and since 2008 I live predominantly in Italy, where I also have national residence.

The motto of this blog is La lotta continua.

2. A Human Rights blog, and the earliest blog by a professor in Sweden

The name of this blog originally derived from the fact it was the first ever published by a professor in Sweden (in Swedish, “Sveriges första professorsblogg”). Later other professors and academics started to contribute with their analyses, and thus the name became The Professors’ Blog. It  started with an article published in 2005 after my return from an epidemiology assignment by the Karolinska Institutet to the Tsunami disaster-area in Thailand, and with some severe criticism to the Swedish establishment which in my opinion had neglected the native population of the area affected.

Besides the treatment of a) public health and psychiatric-epidemiology themes (e.g. the analysis of the Swedish pseudo-diagnosis utbrändhet), main concerns of this blog has been b) Swedish foreign policy /geopolitics and Human-Rights infringements against populations targeted by military interventions supported directly or indirectly by Sweden, and c) Swedish legislations aimed to infringe Humans Rights and private integrity of Swedish citizens, such as the Surveillance law (FRA-lagen) .

d) In 2010 Professors blogg took the central theme of the Human Rights of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in several items infringed by the Swedish authorities and journalists in the Main stream media. This also  lead to a witness-testimony on behalf of Julian Assange’s legal defence in London 2011. In July 2012, over 150 analyses and other articles had been published here on behalf of this human-right cause.

This blog has been in the past  subjected to censorship or filtering by the Swedish mainstream media, and in view of some stronger action apparently displayed by the authorities in suppressing known Swedish blogs which defend the cause of justice of Julian Assange, I decided to move its publication to Italy.

Other authors publishing contributions in this blog: Andrew Kreig, Naomi Wolf, Traci Birge, Jennifer Robinson, John Pilger, and Helene Bergman.