Kati Suominen is Visiting Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Founder and CEO of TradeUp, LLC, a new financing platform for export-driven U.S. SMEs, and Founder and CEO of Nextrade Group, LLC, a consulting firm on leading-edge issues in world trade. Suominen has deep expertise in international trade, economics, and finance. In 2010-12, Suominen was awarded a fellowship in the Economics Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a leading Washington think-tank. In 2004-2010, she served as International Trade Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, where she advised senior trade policymakers around the world and managed the Banks global and Asia-Pacific trade and economic policy research, and developed the Banks lending strategies for trade and competitiveness across Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2006-09, she also served as advisor to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) senior officials meetings on ways to advance toward regional free trade. She has worked recently with such leading institutions as the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Brookings Institution, USAID, Chatham House, and Italian Institute for International Affairs. At CSIS, she is currently leading an eBay-sponsored project to catalyze U.S. online small and mid-size enterprise exporters and expand the digital economy across emerging markets.She is also the chair of a 25-member global expert committee on regional trade agreements and the WTO for the E15 Initiative convened by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) and World Economic Forum, and the idea woman behind the RTA Exchange, a new global clearing house and dialogue forum on free trade agreements sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank Institute, and ICTSD that was unveiled at the WTO Ministerial in December 2013 in Bali and that Nextrade Group is building into a Beta version in 2014.

1.  Peerless and Periled: The Paradox of America’s Leadership in the World Economic Order (Stanford University Press, 2012).

2. Globalization at Risk: Challenges to Finance and Trade (Yale University Press, 2010) – with Gary Hufbauer.

3. Regional Rules in the Global Trading System (Cambridge University Press, 2009).