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Christian Bjørn Følsgaard is a senior advisor to the Atlantic Council’s GeoStrategy Initiative within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. His work focuses on global supply chain security, resilience, and diplomacy, with an emphasis on strengthening multilateral engagement in the Global South through open, transparent, and strategic public–private partnerships.
An expert in the intersection of global trade and statecraft, Følsgaard serves as a visiting professor of Supply Chain Diplomacy at the University of Addis Ababa’s School of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. He is also the course designer and lead instructor of the graduate course “Foundations of Supply Chain Diplomacy” at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Center for Experiential Learning, where his work examines the relationship between the supply chain configurations of sovereign states and their foreign policy choices. He has previously taught at the University of Cambridge and has served as a guest lecturer at the Royal United Services Institute, the Special Forces Club in London, and Columbia University.
Følsgaard has built his career in the private sector as Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Industry Five, a leading manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing company based in Addis Ababa and partly owned by Ethiopian Investment Holdings, Africa’s largest sovereign wealth fund. In 2018, he and his team were named North American finalists in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Inclusive Innovation Challenge in recognition of their work on ergonomically optimized collaborative robotics. He remains actively engaged in industry and technology policy communities as a contributor to the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s AISMA alliance.
Følsgaard holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in history and human complex systems, where he was awarded the Carey McWilliams Honors Thesis Prize and Highest Departmental Honors. He earned his MPhil and PhD from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge.
