Dr. Isabel Studer is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center and director for strategic partnerships, Latin America at The Nature Conservancy. She is also the former executive director for Mexico and Northern Central America at The Nature Conservancy.
She was the founding director of the Global Institute for Sustainability and Leader of Energy and Corporate Sustainability at EGADE Business School at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where she also founded and headed the Center for Dialogue and Analysis on North America (CEDAN).
Studer has held several positions in the Mexican government: general director of cooperation and bilateral economic relations at the Mexican Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AMEXCID), deputy general director of Canada at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and general director for the United States and Canada at the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), where she served as the secretary’s alternate representative to the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC). She was also director of research for the Commission for Labor Cooperation (CLC) in Washington, DC.
She is president of the board of the Mexican Climate Initiative and member of the board of directors of the World Environment Center (WEC) in Washington DC, the Dow Chemical Company’s Sustainability Experts’ Advisory Board (SEAC), Mexico’s Advisory Council on Water, the French Development Agency in Mexico and the National Council on Tourist Enterprises. Previously, she served as a member of the National Climate Change Council, chaired by Nobel Prize Mario Molina, the Advisory Council of the Center for Private Sector Studies for Sustainable Development (CESPEDES), the Scientific Committee for The Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) of Science Po (Paris) and the Advisory Board of the Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Index (ND GAIN), among others.
A Fulbright and Ford scholar, she has been recognized twice (2018 & 2019) by Forbes Magazine as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in Mexico” and, each year between 2013 and 2015, by Petróleo y Energía as one of the “100 Energy Leaders in Mexico.”
Studer earned a PhD and an MA in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a BA in international relations from El Colegio de México. Author and coeditor of several books, she has written extensively on climate change, trade and environment, renewable energy and economic integration, regional governance and labor markets and migration. She has been a commentator on climate, energy and sustainable development for key media outlets in Mexico and has been an editorial writer for El Universal, Excelsior and Forbes Mexico.