Sheryl WuDunn

Pulitzer Prize-winning best selling author

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 technology and healthcare services. She is also a senior managing director at Mid-Market Securities, LLC, which focuses on middle market companies in the U.S.

Previously, WuDunn has been vice president in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a commercial loan officer at Bankers Trust. She also is 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. She has been a Hauser Visiting Leader in 2017 and 2018 at the Harvard Kennedy School where she has lectured and taught seminars to graduate students.  In 2011, she co-taught at Yale University, and she has guest lectured at many universities.

With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, she is co-author of four best-selling books.  These include A Path Appears, about how to bring about change in our society using evidence-based strategies; Half the Sky, a No. 1 New York Times best-selling book about the challenges facing women around the globe; Thunder from the East about Asia, and China Wakes about China’s challenges.

Ms. WuDunn appeared in and helped shape PBS documentaries for the two most recent books, and she helped launch the development of the Half the Sky multi-platform digital effort that also included mobile games and an online social media game on Facebook that hit #9 on the platform.

Ms. WuDunn 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 award.  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, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Prize, among numerous others.

In 2011, Newsweek cited WuDunn as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World.”  In 2012, WuDunn 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.

She graduated from Cornell University, earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.  She has served on the Board of Trustees at Cornell University and Princeton University.

Ms. WuDunn received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College.   Ms. WuDunn 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, economic issues and her books on television and radio programs, with hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Colbert, and on other news programs such as Meet the Press, Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV, and NPR.

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