Dr. Susan M. Blaustein, Speaker

Dr. Susan M. Blaustein is the Founder and Executive Director of WomenStrong International, a global nonprofit that advances progress toward gender equity by partnering with grassroots women-led organizations in urban and peri-urban areas dedicated to improving the lives of the girls and women they serve.

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Inspired by her work empowering women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Blaustein founded WomenStrong to drive transformative change.

Prior to WomenStrong, Dr. Blaustein co-founded and directed The Millennium Cities Initiative, a project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute designed to support low-resource cities across the sub-Saharan region in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. There, over the course of more than a decade, Dr. Blaustein repeatedly witnessed the effectiveness of local women and girls in the cities’ poorest communities in taking the lead to create transformative change.

Before her service at The Earth Institute, Dr. Blaustein worked as a senior consultant and analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank focused on conflict prevention, and with the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based NGO supporting the efforts of international criminal tribunals to prosecute gross human rights abusers in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone.

Writing and Academic Contributions

A prolific writer, Dr. Blaustein has reported on conflict, politics, economics, and social injustice from the Balkans, Southeast Asia, and Washington, D.C., for such publications as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. She served previously as Assistant Professor at Columbia University, where she now teaches in The Climate School and is researching her book, Toward a Just and Sustainable City, on essential ecosystems enabling community-driven urban development.

Education and Honors

Dr. Blaustein’s doctorate is from Yale University. She was a Harvard Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of multiple awards, including from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, Asia Initiatives, which honored her in 2018 with the Ban Ki-moon Award for Women’s Empowerment, and Women’s e-News, which chose Dr. Blaustein as one of “21 Leaders for the 21st Century.”

Topics of Expertise

At Columbia University, Dr. Blaustein taught the course, Women in Cities: Integrating Needs, Rights, Access and Opportunity into Sustainable Urban Design, Planning, and Management.

Her areas of expertise include:

Gender and Urban Life
Right to the City
Gender Equity
Gender and Climate
Gender, Disaster, Displacement
Gender and Foreign Policy
Sustainable Cities
Women’s Right and Access to Reproductive Health Care
Girls’ Education and Empowerment
Preventing Gender-Based Violence
Economic Security and Opportunity: Women’s Collective Asset-Building
International Development: Flipping the Script
Power Shift: Trust-based Grantmaking

Current Board and Advisory Roles

Dr. Blaustein currently serves on the boards and advisory councils of:

Partners for Dignity and Rights (formerly the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative)
Physicians for Human Rights
The Conversationalist: Online Gen Z Community
The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (Advisory Council)
A small family foundation