Sheryl WuDunn

Sheryl WuDunn is a business executive, best-selling author, journalist, and international women’s rights advocate. In 1989, she became the first Asian American to win a Pulitzer Prize, for her in-depth reporting on the Tiananmen Square protests. She has co-written three bestselling books with her husband, New York Times columnist, Nicolas Kristof.
 
A third generation Chinese-American, WuDunn grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and graduated from Cornell University in 1981. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1987 and an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in 1994.
 
In 1989. WuDunn joined the Times’ Beijing bureau, where she and Kristof covered the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and several other major stories in China and Southeast Asia. Their reporting was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize and spurred three best-selling books: China Wakes, Thunder From the East, and Half the Sky, the last of which chronicles the oppression of women worldwide and the practical solutions for their advancement which spur development. WuDunn also helped develop the Half the Sky movement multimedia movement, which includes a PBS documentary series.
WuDunn became one of the few people to move between the editorial side and the business side of the New York Times when, in 2000, she became executive director of Times’s Circulation NexGen project. Over the next several years she went on to hold several other business executive positions at the Times, before leaving to become a Vice President of Asset Management at Goldman Sachs. Since 2009, she has been managing director at the boutique investment firm Mid-Market Solutions. In addition to their Pulitzer, the first awarded to a married couple, WuDunn and Kristof received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement. WuDunn has also been honored with the George Polk Award and Overseas Press Club Awards and White House Project EPIC Award.