Sheryl WuDunn, the first Asian-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, is a business
executive and best-selling author. Currently, she works with entrepreneurs in new media, media
technology and social enterprise at a small investment banking boutique in NYC. She also runs
TripleEdge, which focuses on socially driven investing.
Previously, WuDunn has been vice president, in the role of investment advisor for private
clients, 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’ 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 is co-author of 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, The
Colbert Report and other network television shows. Half the Sky became a multi-platform digital
media effort that included a highly popular documentary series on PBS in October 2012, mobile
games and an online social media game on Facebook that hit #9 in its second week on the
platform.
With her husband, Nicholas D. Kristof, she has co-authored two other best-selling books
about Asia: Thunder from the East and China Wakes. 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 awards. 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 other awards.
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.
She earned an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, where she is a
former member of its Advisory Council. She was elected in spring 2013 as an alumni trustee to
Princeton University’s Board of Trustees for a term beginning July 1, 2014. She earned an M.B.A.
from Harvard Business School. She graduated from Cornell University, where she was a member
of the Board of Trustees from 2002 to 2013 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. She is now a member of the Board of Trustees at Princeton
University. WuDunn received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and
Middlebury College.
A Senior Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in fall 2011,
WuDunn also lectures on economic, political and social topics related to women in the
developing world, the global economy, China and the emerging markets. Additionally, she has
been asked to address a wide range of audiences including former Vice President Al Gore, the
IMF and World Bank. WuDunn has discussed China and economic issues on television and radio
programs, such as Meet the Press, Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV, The Colbert Report, Charlie
Rose and NPR, and she has discussed philanthropic issues on programs such as NBC’s Dateline.