Karen Bakker

Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Scientist, Writer/Editor

Karen Bakker is an award-winning Canadian author, scientist, and entrepreneur known for her work on digital transformation, environmental governance, and sustainability. A Rhodes Scholar with a PhD from Oxford, she is a Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow (2023). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Stanford University’s Annenberg Fellowship in Communication. Through her Smart Earth project (https://smartearthproject.com/), she is exploring how the tools of the Digital Age can solve the most pressing challenges of the Anthropocene, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and the future of work. She is also the author of a dozen books, including “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants” (Princeton University Press, 2022), which has been translated into eight languages, published in a dozen countries, and is the winner of the 2023 Nautilus and Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including The New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, WIRED, Vox, New Scientist, Science, Nature, Scientific American and on the BBC, NBC, NPR, and Good Morning America. A serial entrepreneur, Karen has founded and led two tech companies and is currently VP Strategy for Riipen, a social impact tech company which is solving the skills gap by enabling online internships, focused on youth from underserved communities. Writing under her pseudonym, Karen Le Billon, she also is the author of French Kids Eat Everything, which was translated into a dozen languages, featured widely in the media, and sparked an international movement: ‘taste training’ young children to love eating vegetables.

A livable Earth for future generations, biodiversity, climate change, digital transformation, AI and synthetic biology, Future of Work. Hiking, sailing, and time out on the water. Writing.

Digital tech can address some of our most pressing environmental challenges, like climate change and biodiversity loss.

Impromptu poetry.