Bay Area Council Staff

Kristen Durham China Activities Coordinator

Kristen Durham is China Activities Coordinator at the Bay Area Council, where she is responsible for developing a growing array of initiatives and activities to foster business cooperation between the Bay Area and China.  In particular, she is coordinating the Council’s Shanghai Business Roundtable, a California-China clean energy conference to be held in Shanghai on November 13-14, 2008.  She also provides logistical and management support for visiting Chinese delegations and BAC’s China Initiative.

Previously, Kristen was a graduate student in the Energy & Resources Group at UC-Berkeley, where she earned her M.S. in May 2008.  While at Berkeley, Kristen’s work focused on international development economics and resource management policy, and she contributed to resource analysis projects with a variety of organizations like the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the UC-Berkeley California Climate Action Partnership.  She has also been an active volunteer with the China-US Energy Efficiency Alliance, a non-profit environmental advocacy group in the Bay Area.

Kristen grew up in Missouri and graduated from the University of Missouri with a B.S. degree in agricultural economics, during which she also pursued studies in environmental engineering at Wuhan University (Wuhan, China).  She speaks Mandarin Chinese and enjoys travel, cooking international foods, and volleyball.