Nicole Itano is the Director of Policy and Engagement at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Executive Director of the Remaking Trade Project. She brings more than two decades of experience spanning international policy, development finance, philanthropy, and journalism. Her work focuses on the intersection of trade, climate, global economic governance, and development and explores the reforms needed to ensure that international economic systems better serve environmental sustainability and shared prosperity. 

Nicole leads the project’s work with academic, government, philanthropy, and policy partners around the world to develop and build momentum for practical proposals on trade governance, industrial strategy, subsidies, investment, and sustainability-linked trade measures. 

She is also the chair of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation, a UK-based non-profit that supports campaigners and changemakers. She also sits on the advisory board of the African Tech Futures Lab and is an advisor to the Funders’ Roundtable on the Future of Development, which she helped establish. 

Before joining the project, Nicole built and led a grantmaking portfolio at the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group (CECG) supporting policy, campaigning, and communications focused on reforming global financial systems to expand developing countries’ capacity to invest in climate change policy and sustainable development. She has worked across a wide range of multilateral negotiations and processes, including the G20, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, and United Nations climate negotiations. Raised in Boulder, Colorado, Nicole has lived in the United States, South Africa, Greece, and the United Kingdom and held senior roles at WWF-UK and Save the Children UK. Earlier in her career, she reported on politics, economics, and business across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for Bloomberg TV. 

Nicole has a B.A. from Yale University and is the author of No Place Left to Bury the Dead: Denial, Despair and Hope in the African AIDS Pandemic.