Annette Wiedenbach is a 2018/19 Alumna Fellow of the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During her fellowship, she explored the role of cities and public-private partnerships in implementing the sustainability agenda at the global level and actively collaborated on an urban development project with the government of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, Argentina.

Prior to her foray into the world of science at MIT, she worked for Bayer and Covestro for more than 20 years in the pharmaceutical and chemical divisions in China, Taiwan and Singapore, where her scope of work included executive, crisis and internal communications as well as media relations, government affairs, organisational development, change management and CSR. As responsible for Sustainability at Covestro in Asia Pacific, she developed a design for interdisciplinary co-creation workshops to identify areas for activity and drive a mindset that would enable all employees to understand and think of their work in terms of sustainability.

From 2015 to 2018 as a member of the steering committee of the Covestro Tongji Chair of Sustainable Development at Shanghai’s Tongji University she drove the Chair’s research and teaching focus on the role of materials in achieving better urban sustainability. She also co-chaired the Sustainability Task Force of the China Petrochemical and Chemical Industry Association to facilitate exchange between multinational companies subscribed to Responsible Care and Chinese enterprises. In her free time, she supports Climate Scorecard, a Boston-based NGO (climatescorecard.org) with monthly reports and analysis on China’s commitment to meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement.