Amanda Williams is a Sustainability Research Fellow and Term Research Professor at the Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business.

Amanda’s research lies at the intersection of sustainability management and social-ecological systems. She studies how organizations understand global sustainability issues and develop corporate sustainability strategies that align with global targets. She approaches her work from a systems theory perspective and works with qualitative research methods. She has published her work in the Academy of Management Discoveries, Strategic Organization, Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Cleaner Production. Her practitioner articles have been published in Stanford Social Innovation Review and I by IMD.

Prior to joining IMD, Amanda was a Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich where she collaborated with the UN Global Compact Network Switzerland to embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into corporate strategy. She was previously a research fellow in the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School. Amanda holds a PhD from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University where she helped to create the award-winning MOOC Driving Business Towards the SDGs. During her PhD, Amanda was a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the EU-funded training network Innovation for Sustainability (I4S). For this project, she collaborated with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) where she was also an associate on the Redefining Value team. At WBCSD, she contributed to the SDG Compass, a guide for business action to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Before starting her PhD, Amanda earned an MSc in Business Administration Research from ESSEC Business School. She also obtained an MBA in Environmentally Sustainable Management and a BSc in Graphic Media Marketing both from Rochester Institute of Technology. She worked in marketing for a technology company for several years.