Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas D. Kristof grew up near the small town of Yam Hill, Oregon on a sheep and cherry farm, and began his journalism career editing his high school newspaper. He attended Harvard University, then Oxford University for law school on a Rhodes Scholarship. During those years Kristof became enamored with travel, and Kirstof has traveled to 140 countries and lived on four continents. At twenty-five, he joined The New York Times, for which he was a correspondent in Beijing with his wife Sheryl WuDunn. His op-ed columns for The Times remain a key platform for drawing the public eye to oft-ignored human rights violations worldwide. Over his career, he has investigated overseas at great personal risk, including eleven trips to Sudan during the War in Darfur, which he was among the first reporters to call a genocide. Jeffrey Toobin, a Harvard classmate and journalist, has called him “the moral conscience of our generation of journalists.” The recipient of two Pulitzer prizes and many other awards. A third-generation Chinese American, WuDunn grew up in Manhattan. She attended Cornell, then Harvard Business School for her M.B.A., and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for her M.P.A. Having been on staff at The Washington Post and The New York Times, WuDunn’s career has been diverse and high-achieving: she was also a business executive at The Times, an evening news anchor, and a vice president at Goldman Sachs, among other roles. Much of her career has focused on emerging markets in China and the developing world, and on women entrepreneurs. In 2011, she was listed among Newsweek’s Women Who Shake the World. Like Kristof, she’s a champion of human rights and won a Pulitzer Prize in collaboration with her husband for their coverage in China on the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989. WuDunn and Kristoff have collaborated to write four best-selling books.