Quick Take

First-ever Business and Human Rights Fellows Learn from Experts in Training at NYU Stern

April Gu

August 11, 2015

With their summer internships heating up, we invited our inaugural USCIB-NYU Stern Business and Human Rights Fellows, Jodi Chao and Lourdes Zapata (both MBA ’16) back to the Center to spend a day with experts and practitioners in the field.

The USCIB-NYU Stern Business and Human Rights Fellowship enables first-year MBA students to join a specialized training program and complete a paid summer internship in business and human rights at a multinational company. They work closely with executives at participating companies to help formulate and measure the companies’ sustainability initiatives and advance their human rights commitments.

Jodi and Lourdes have spent months gaining valuable experience at PepsiCo and DirecTV Latin America, respectively. And to deepen their knowledge, we invited Lou Coppola, Partner & EVP of the Governance & Accountability Institute, Inc. and Su Gao, Senior ESG Analyst at Bloomberg LP, to share their expertise.

Lou regularly provides advice to corporations and investors on sustainability strategy, investment and performance. He presented a framework of how “sustainability” is measured in various industries and how they can provide competitive advantages to companies. Su then took the Fellows through Bloomberg’s leading efforts to gather and quantify companies’ performance on environmental, social and governance issues through the terminal.

For lunch, the Center also hosted Nicole Karlebach, Senior Legal Counsel, Business & Human Rights of Yahoo!; Ursula Wynhoven, General Counsel at UN Global Compact; and our own Research Director Doro Baumann-Pauly for a lively discussion on current trends and developing a career in business and human rights.

We’ve heard glowing reviews from the Fellows about their internships so far (more on that to come at the end of the summer!) and are proud of them for representing NYU Stern and the Center so well. Due to the success of the USCIB-NYU Stern Business and Human Rights Fellowship in its first year, we are hard at work to expand and create even more opportunities for the incoming MBA1s in the fall.

Business Education