Bill has had a distinguished career in banking, having spent 26 years with JP Morgan in diverse leadership roles, becoming co-Chief Executive Officer of the investment bank in 2004 until he stepped down in 2009. Bill was the only career banker to be invited to be a committee member of the Independent Commission on Banking, established by the UK government in 2010 to recommend ways to improve competition and financial stability in banking. Subsequently, he served as advisor to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and was asked by the Court of the Bank of England to complete an independent review of the bank’s liquidity operations. Bill founded the hedge fund Renshaw Bay in 2011 where he was Chairman and CEO until he stepped down from the company on appointment to the Standard Chartered PLC Board.

Bill was previously a non-executive director of Pension Insurance Corporation plc before stepping down in October 2015. He is an independent non-executive director of Novartis International AG.

He holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Colgate University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2013.

Professor Sachs was the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership. He was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders and has received 28 honorary degrees.  The New York Times called Sachs “probably the most important economist in the world,” and Time magazine called Sachs “the world’s best-known economist.” A survey by The Economist ranked Sachs as among the three most influential living economists.

Professor Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.  He is University Professor at Columbia University, the university’s highest academic rank. Sachs was Director of the Earth Institute from 2002 to 2016.

Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers, The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).  Other books include To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013), The Age of Sustainable Development (2015), Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair & Sustainable (2017),  A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), and most recently, Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020).

Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard.