Sarah Cook is Professor, University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), a Visiting Researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, Associate of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Lecturer, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. In a career spanning academia and international organisations, she has held leadership positions in the United Nations, including as Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) during the key years of formulating the SDGs, and of UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti. She has extensive experience working in China as an academic and grant maker with the Ford Foundation. Her research has focused on issues of economic and social inequality in development contexts, with publications in areas of gender, the care economy, work, employment and informality, health, social policy and just climate transitions. She is currently an editor of the Journal of Global Social Policy, a member of a CCICED Working Group on China’s environment and development, and part of networks on the care-climate nexus and feminist approaches to a well-being economy. She has a BA from Oxford, MSc from LSE and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

She is currently a member of the CCICED High level task force on Enviornment and Development http://en.cciced.net/

She is a member of the group of experts appointed by the UN Secretary General to write the 2027 Global Sustainable Development Report https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2025/09/pr-2027-gsdr/