Stefan Lovgren
Stefan Lovgren was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the United States for college, earning a degree in business economics in San Francisco. He later completed a master's in international affairs at Columbia University in New York, where he received a full fellowship with the Institute of African Studies — which pointed him toward a career he hadn't entirely planned on.
His first real journalism job came in 1996, when he landed in Burundi to cover a military coup for the Associated Press. He spent the next five years as Africa correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, based in Nairobi, filing stories from across the continent — conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, Ebola outbreaks, the AIDS epidemic. It was an education in the field that no school could replicate.
In 2003, he began contributing to National Geographic News, the outlet's online news service, whose stories were regularly syndicated by the New York Times. Writing across science, environment, history, culture, and astronomy for a general audience turned out to be an unexpected apprenticeship for someone without formal scientific training. Over time, his focus narrowed toward freshwater — rivers, lakes, and the biodiversity that depends on them. It is one of the most underreported environmental stories of our time: freshwater ecosystems cover less than one percent of the Earth's surface yet support a third of all vertebrate species, and they are in freefall. Stefan has contributed feature articles on freshwater issues to National Geographic platforms, Mongabay, Yale Environment 360, Circle of Blue, and many others.
Since 2019, Stefan has been a research scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno. From 2019 to 2025, he served as media director for the Wonders of the Mekong project, a USAID-funded conservation initiative, helping generate unprecedented global media coverage and remarkable media value for a research project of its kind. During that time he produced stories for National Geographic related to the Mekong River — from the discovery of the world's largest freshwater fish, a giant stingray that earned a Guinness World Record, to the threats facing one of the world's most productive river systems. The Mekong has become an area of particular expertise. He is the founder of Freshwater Frontlines, a journalism initiative focused on urgent global freshwater reporting.
Stefan is the co-author of Chasing Giants (University of Nevada Press, 2023), written with biologist Zeb Hogan, about the search for the world's largest freshwater fish. He has also written Sven: My Story, the autobiography of England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, which became a number-one bestseller in Sweden and was translated into ten languages; Fotbollsspelarpojken, a biography of Swedish football coach Tord Grip; and En Bluffpilots Bekännelse — the outrageous true story of a Swedish airline captain who flew commercially for thirteen years without a license, a real-life Catch Me If You Can story.
Football has been a running thread through his career. Stefan has covered the World Cup since 2002, including four finals, and has written extensively about the sport alongside his environmental work. He and his three sons are all devoted Liverpool supporters.
As a filmmaker and multimedia producer, Stefan has done television work for NBC, MSNBC, Sky News, and Swedish Television, among others, and has produced a wide range of short and educational films, many for National Geographic. He directed Return to Virunga, a documentary about efforts to protect mountain gorillas in the Congo, and spent years following the Nigerian amputee football team through to their first World Cup appearance in Mexico in 2018. He typically works as a one-man operation — writing, filming, and shooting drone photography — and has reported from close to 100 countries.
He has lived in Las Vegas since 2021, where he recently finished rebuilding his house largely on his own. He is now turning his attention to restoring a vintage Airstream trailer — another project he is approaching with characteristic enthusiasm and no prior experience whatsoever.