Sheryl WuDunn is an author and award-winning journalist, an experienced higher education trustee, and a business and finance consultant with a broad international perspective and a long-standing interest in how universities can serve society.  

The first Asian American to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, WuDunn was honored in 1990 for her reporting from China on the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement and ensuing massacre. As a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, she also covered a coup in the Philippines and a sarin gas attack and a banking crisis in Japan. In 2009 she received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement for her work chronicling human rights around the world.

She has co-written five nonfiction books with her spouse, Nicholas Kristof AB ’82, including Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide; A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity; and Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope.  

As cofounder of FullSky Partners, WuDunn advises companies in health care and technology committed to social impact.

A former Hauser Visiting Leader at Harvard Kennedy School, she now serves on the advisory board of the School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. She has been a trustee of Cornell and Princeton.

“Education drives economic mobility everywhere. Harvard is a global leader and role model, setting a tone and agenda, and it can do so much to promote education and opportunity. Harvard should be seen as part of an engine of opportunity that can work for all seekers and help bring about positive change.”