North America Women and Urban SDGs: An Urban Paradigm Shift Towards Gender Equality

Urban Thinkers Campus (The City We Need NOW!)

Robin King

Director, Knowledge Capture and Collaboration, the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, World Resources Institute (WRI), and adjunct professor, the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Dr. Robin King is the Director, Knowledge Capture and Collaboration, at the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities at the World Resources Institute (WRI) and an adjunct professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is an institutional economist with experience in public, private, international organizations and NGOs with international experience, with a focus on US, Latin America, and India. The work has ranged from sovereign debt and international trade negotiations to institutional approaches to infrastructure financing and governance to more recent work at WRI on integrating land use and transport planning and implementation and ensuring that equity and inclusion is embedded in our work. Her work has sought to bridge different communities, disciplines and approaches to catalyze solutions. Highlights of her career include working on the economics and trade component of the Mid-East peace talks for the US State Dept; converting a mainframe database to a web based, quadrilingual system at the OAS; helping start a science and technology policy think tank in India (CSTEP); and most recently, moving WRI’s work in urban development from merely focusing on urban design to incorporating governance and finance aspects as well and emphasizing equity throughout our portfolio of projects. Robin has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas-Austin, and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Georgetown University. She has held positions at Mellon Bank, the US Department of State, the OAS, the G7 Group, and the Center for the Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP, in India) before coming to WRI, and grew up in Niagara Falls, NY in the old days when we could ride our bikes across the border with a smile and a dime.