Sheryl WuDunn

Sheryl WuDunn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who has reported from inside some of the toughest regimes in the world, from Myanmar to North Korea. As a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, WuDunn covered China and won a Pulitzer with her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, for their coverage of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in Beijing and the military crackdown that ended it. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism, and she was first Asian-American woman to win a Pulitzer.

As a banker, WuDunn also has a deep knowledge of finance and the global economy. With a background in banking and an MBA from Harvard University, she was the lead correspondent for The Times covering the Japan financial crisis that has produced lessons for today's economic turmoil; her longtime coverage of the economic development of China and other emerging markets has given her a broad understanding and many first-hand examples of how change in centrally-planned economies can come about peacefully through growth.

Her experiences trekking through Asia over the years, along with the reporting her husband has done as an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, led the two of them to write Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide, about women in the developing world. Half the Sky illuminates the stories of many women who have suffered excruciatingly under their society’s feudal attitudes toward women. It also describes how a growing crop of social entrepreneurs, mostly local women, are solving these problems and transforming societies around them. Kristof and WuDunn have developed their own ways to bring about change, and they recently went to Cambodia to launch a project to help do just that.

WuDunn also brings a corporate view toward issues and has focused on expanding the concept of work/life balance to a circle of life: financial protection, work/life balance, and giving back. She recently worked at Goldman Sachs, where she was an investment advisor guiding individual investors through the great market turmoil of 2008. Previously, she worked in strategic planning at The New York Times, helping develop new business opportunities in the media and NYT-branded extensions, and she was deeply involved in sales and marketing for The Times’ circulation department. She was The Times’ first television anchor for its nightly headlines broadcast, and she helped develop a four-hour documentary on China for The Times’ Discovery Times Channel. She has won other journalism prizes, including the Polk and Overseas Press Club awards.

She graduated from Cornell University, where she is a member of the Board of Trustees; she is a former member of the Cornell endowment’s investment committee, and a member of the Board Finance Committee. In addition to her MBA, she went to Princeton University, where she got an M.P.A. degree at the Woodrow Wilson School. She is currently a member of the Woodrow Wilson School Advisory Council. WuDunn speaks Chinese and some French and Japanese.