Sebastian Buckup is Head of Programming and Member of the Executive Committee at the World Economic Forum. His team shapes global, regional, and industry agendas at the Forum’s annual meeting in Davos and numerous issue and region specific summits around the world. Before joining the World Economic Forum in 2008, Sebastian worked amongst others at the UNDP Office of Development Studies, the International Labour Organization, as well as a successful technology start-up which he co-founded in his student years.

Sebastian holds a Master and a PhD in economics from Witten/Herdecke University (Germany), as well as a Master in Political Economy from the London School of Economics. In his doctoral thesis, he developed a game theoretical approach to describing dynamics in the collaborative production of public goods. Sebastian is a regular commentator on issues at the intersection of economics, politics and technology in publications including Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, Project Syndicate and Quartz, as well as the German weekly “Die Zeit”. Since 2012, Sebastian is a research fellow at the University of Geneva and an Associate Professor in its flagship IO MBA programme.