Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran is the global energy & climate innovation editor of The Economist. He has produced numerous cover stories and won awards for his reporting. He is an accomplished public speaker and his three books have created a stir, with accolades ranging from lengthy reviews in The New Yorker to shortlisting for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize. The Financial Times has declared him to be “a writer to whom it is worth paying attention.”

From 2017 to 2021, he served as the New York-based US Business Editor. He opened the magazine’s first Shanghai bureau in 2012 and served as its China Business Editor until mid-2017. Prior to that, he covered biotechnology, healthcare and global innovation. He also opened the Mexico City bureau, the publication’s first in Latin America.

His opinion pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times and Foreign Policy, and his commentaries on CNBC and Bloomberg. He has addressed groups ranging from the US National Governors’ Association and the UN General Assembly to the TED and Aspen Ideas conferences. He also serves as chairman of sustainability & innovation summits organized by The Economist, held annually in New York, London, Bangkok and Cape Town.

Vaitheeswaran is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves as an advisor on innovation to the World Economic Forum/Davos, and has taught at New York University's Stern Business School and Northwestern University. He is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.