Sheryl WuDunn, the first Chinese-American reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize, has been a longtime banker, New York Times journalist, best-selling author, business consultant and even wine-maker. She has her own consulting company, advises firms, serves on boards and makes Pinot Noir on the side.
WuDunn is co-founder and principal of FullSky Partners, advising for-profit ventures with a social mission in technology and healthcare. FullSky drives smart philanthropic funding into innovative cancer therapeutics, including pediatric brain tumors, or cancer diagnostics, including detection in stage one and two. She also is co-owner at Kristof Farms, which grows grapes and apples to produce the highly rated Kristof Wines and award-winning Kristof Farms cider.
Previously, WuDunn has been vice president in the investment management division at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and had a long career at The New York Times both as a journalist and an executive. She was a project director in The Times’s Strategic Planning Department, and she ran a department to attract readers under 30. Also at The Times, she was a foreign correspondent based in Beijing and Tokyo, a business editor and The Times’s first anchor of an evening news headlines program. She is co-author with her husband, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, of five best-selling nonfiction books: Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope; Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide; China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power; A Path Appears; and Thunder from the East. Several of the books were turned into PBS documentaries in which WuDunn played a central role.
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.
Ms. WuDunn has an M.B.A. from Harvard, an M.P.A. from Princeton University and a B.A. from Cornell University. She currently serves on the Board of Overseers at Harvard University and is a former member of the Board of Trustees at Princeton University and Cornell University. She has been a Hauser Visiting Leader at the Harvard Kennedy School where she has lectured and taught seminars on ESG and sustainability investing. She has also co-taught at Yale University and guest lectured at many universities, and has received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College.
WuDunn and Kristof have three children. In her spare time, WuDunn enjoys reading, hiking and sipping wine.
