Kristen Durham is Vice President of Global Initiatives at the Bay Area Council (BAC) and a senior analyst with the BAC Economic Institute, where she is responsible for developing a growing array of initiatives and activities to foster economic development, climate protection, and business cooperation in the Bay Area, China and beyond.

Kristen joined the Bay Area Council in June 2008 to coordinate the BAC’s US|China Green Tech Summit, a bi-national clean energy conference held November 2008 in Shanghai. Since then, her work has expanded to include leading the establishment of a BAC trade and investment promotion office in the Yangpu District of Shanghai, directing development of the Bay Area Economic Recovery Workplan for the State of California’s stimulus spending, managing the BAC Economic Institute’s 2009 report on the recession’s impacts in the Bay Area, and contributing to Climate Bay Area—the regional convener of government, business and non-profit interests around climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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 U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the UC-Berkeley Climate Action Partnership. She remains active with the China-U.S. Energy Efficiency Alliance and the Asia Society of Northern California.

A native of rural Missouri, Kristen did her undergraduate work in agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, during which time she also pursued studies in environmental engineering at Wuhan University (Wuhan, China) and worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Trade Office in Guangzhou. She speaks conversational Mandarin Chinese.