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Sheryl WuDunn

Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business executive and best-selling author. She co-founded FullSky Partners, a consulting firm focusing on double-bottom line ventures in new media, technology and healthcare services. She is also a venture partner at Piedmont Partners Group Ventures, which invests in growth companies in the U.S. Previously, Ms. WuDunn has been vice president in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She is also one of a small handful of people who have worked at The New York Times both as an executive and journalist: in management roles in both the strategic planning and circulation sales departments at The Times; as editor for international markets, energy and industry; as The Times’s first anchor of an evening news headlines program for a digital cable TV channel, the Discovery-Times; and as a foreign correspondent for The Times in Tokyo and Beijing, where she wrote about economic, financial, political and social issues. In 2011, Ms. WuDunn was also a Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs where she taught about challenges facing China. She has been a Hauser Visiting Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2017 and 2018.

With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, Ms. WuDunn is co-author of their new book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (2020), which chronicles the different struggles facing working-class America. This story is told, in part, by following the lives of some of the children whom Kristof grew up with, and why one quarter died prematurely in adulthood while others had journeys of resurgence involving recovery and commitment to helping those less fortunate. In addition, they co-wrote A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, a New York Times best-selling book about altruism and how to bring about change in our society using evidence-based strategies. Published in late 2014 by Knopf, A Path Appears was turned into a three-part PBS documentary airing in January and February 2015 and was featured on numerous network television shows. They also co-authored Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into
Opportunity for Women Worldwide, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book about the challenges facing women around the globe, published in 2009 by Knopf and featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Colbert Report, among other shows. Ms. WuDunn also helped launch the development of the Half the Sky multi-platform digital effort that included a highly popular documentary series that aired on PBS in October 2012, mobile games and an online social media game on Facebook that hit No. 9 in its second week on the platform.

Ms. WuDunn has co-authored two other best-selling books about Asia: Thunder from the East and China Wakes. She won a Pulitzer Prize with her husband for covering China, along with the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She has also won other journalism prizes, including the George Polk Award and Overseas Press Club awards. Ms. WuDunn has also won a White House Project EPIC award, and she has been a judge for the State Department “Secretary’s Innovation Award for Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment.” She has won other awards, including the Asia Women in Business Corporate Leadership Award, the Pearl S. Buck Woman of the Year Award, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize, among numerous other awards.

In 2011, Newsweek cited Ms. WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.” In 2012, she was selected as one of 60 notable members of the League of Extraordinary Women by Fast Company magazine. In 2013, she was included as one of the “leading women who make America” in the PBS documentary, The Makers. She was also featured in a 2013 Harvard Business School film about prominent women who graduated from HBS. In August 2015, Business Insider named her one of the 31 most successful graduates of the Harvard Business School.

Ms. WuDunn earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a former member of its Advisory Council. She was a member of Princeton University’s Board of Trustees. She earned an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Cornell University, where she is an emeritus member of the Board of Trustees and served on Cornell’s various Board committees, including the Finance Committee, the endowment’s Investment Committee and as co-chair of the Academic Affairs Committee. Ms. WuDunn received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College. She lectures on economic, political and social topics related to women in the developing world, the global economy, China and the emerging markets and has been asked to address a wide range of audiences including former Vice President Al Gore, the IMF and World Bank. Ms. WuDunn has discussed China and economic issues on television and radio programs, such as Meet the Press, Fox Business News, and The Colbert Report, and on NPR and Bloomberg TV. She has discussed philanthropic issues on programs such as NBC’s Dateline.