ABOUT BINA

Bina Venkataraman is an American journalist, policy expert, author, and organizational leader. She is currently Editor-at-Large for Strategy and Innovation and the inaugural Columnist of the Future at The Washington Post. From 2019 to 2022, she served as Editorial Page Editor of The Boston Globe, overseeing the news organization’s opinion coverage and editorial board during two presidential impeachment trials, the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, the death of George Floyd, the Capitol insurrection, and Boston’s historic 2021 mayoral election. During her tenure, the Globe had two Pulitzer finalists for editorial writing. She is the author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (Riverhead, 2019), named a top business book by The Financial Times and a best book of the year by National Public Radio. 

Bina formerly served in the Obama White House as Senior Advisor for Climate Change Innovation, with a focus on community resilience. She also helped shape national policy on a range of issues from outbreak response to STEM education as the former Director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and as a policy advisor to PCAST under President Obama. Since 2011, Bina has taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT; she also teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Bina is a frequent public speaker whose appearances have included the TED mainstage — where she closed the 2019 conference — NPR, Aspen Ideas, CNN, and university campuses around the world. She delivered the 2021 Commencement address at the University of Southern California, and received an honorary doctorate from USC in 2022. Her speech was featured as a top commencement address of the year by The New York Times and appears in the anthology Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women.

She is an alumna of Brown University and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the recipient of a New America national fellowship, a Fulbright scholarship, a Princeton in Asia fellowship, a Metcalf fellowship, and a James Reston fellowship at The New York Times. She was named a Global Young Leader by the French-American Foundation in 2015 and a US-Japan Leadership Program delegate in 2023. She has served on numerous boards including the President’s Leadership Council at Brown University, and currently serves on the Advisory Board of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Media, Politics, and Public Policy; on the Getty Museum's PST ART advisory council; and on the MIT Corporation’s Visiting Committee on the Humanities. She served as a juror for the 2021 and the 2024 Goldsmith Prizes for Investigative Reporting.

Bina has worked in Alaska, India, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, and Guatemala; she grew up in a small town in Ohio. Her early endeavors abroad and at home included translating Spanish and English in emergency rooms, teaching writing to Harlem high school students, working the graveyard shift at a hotel in the Arctic wilderness, lobster fishing in Baja California Sur, and cataloguing films for a cinema critic in Havana. 

You can follow her Washington Post column here.