Dr. Karen Bakker (she/her)
Professor and Canada Research Chair / Co-Director, Program on Water Governance, University of British Columbia
Dr. Karen Bakker is a Canada Research Chair and Professor at the University of British Columbia, with expertise in environmental governance, innovation, and digital technologies. She is the author of more than 100 academic publications and seven books. She is also a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow and member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She has been a visiting speaker at Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.
She is a member of the Board of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Scientific Advisory Council of the Council of Canadian Academies, the Researcher Council of the New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization, and of the governing Council of the federal National Research Council. Fluently bilingual,
Dr. Bakker regularly acts as an advisor to national and international organizations, including various UN bodies.
Dr. Bakker has also been the recipient of Canada’s Top 40 under 40 Award (2011), the Annenberg Fellowship in Communication (from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 2015), and a Cox Visiting Professorship (Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, 2015). Her work was recognized by a SSHRC Impact Award in 2017.
Dr. Bakker is also a tech entrepreneur, and was the founder and CEO of two educational technology startups. After the acquisition of her most recent EdTech startup in 2017, she served as Strategy Director for Riipen, a Future of Work platform.
She obtained her PhD from Oxford University (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar) and her BASc from McMaster University. She lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband, two daughters, and a cat named Luna.