Christine Bader
Visiting speaker and lecturer
Columbia University
Christine Bader is a sought-after speaker and adviser on corporate responsibility, and one of the few experts who has worked in business — both on the front lines and in headquarters — as well as in international policy, nonprofits and government. Christine is a visiting scholar and lecturer at Columbia University, where she co-teaches a course on human rights and business. She is also a human rights advisor to BSR (Business for Social Responsibility), the world’s leading business membership organization focused on sustainability.
After earning her MBA from Yale in 2000, Christine joined BP and proceeded to work in Indonesia, China and the U.K., managing the social impacts of some of the company’s largest projects in the developing world. In 2006, she created a part-time pro bono role as advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for business and human rights, a role she took up full-time in 2008 until the U.N. mandate ended in 2011.
Christine has also worked in the nonprofit and public sectors, having served as a corps member with City Year and a special assistant to the New York City Mayor’s chief of staff and deputy mayor. She serves on the boards of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, named one of the world’s best reference websites; and The OpEd Project, an initiative to broaden the range of voices in public discourse. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Christine has published numerous op-eds and articles and given talks to conferences, companies and universities around the world, including a TEDx talk titled “Manifesto for the Corporate Idealist.” She lives in her native New York City with her husband and two children.