Karen Bakker

Why you should listen

A Guggenheim Fellow and professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Karen Bakker was known for her work on digital transformation, environmental governance and sustainability. She was the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where she worked on her Smart Earth project – a collaborative of ecologists, environmentalists, digital technologists and computer scientists exploring how AI and biodigital technologies can be mobilized to address climate change and biodiversity loss.

A serial tech entrepreneur, Bakker was also the VP of strategy for Riipen, a social impact tech company, and she authored more than 100 academic publications and a dozen books. Her 2022 book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, is a journey into the hidden realm of sound, exploring the surprising and wondrous world of acoustic communication in nature. It won the Nautilus and Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Awards and was chosen as the NPR Science Friday Book Club of the Month in November 2022. The recipient of numerous awards, including Stanford University’s Annenberg Fellowship in Communication, Bakker's work has been translated into dozens of languages and covered by WIRED, Science, The New York Times, NPR and more. She earned her PhD from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.