Cristián is senior special advisor on foreign direct investment (FDI) at Quipu. He is currently Luksic Fellow at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is conducting research on foreign investment in times of civil unrest and constitutional change, while consulting internationally on FDI.

He is the former Managing Director of InvestChile, the country’s foreign investment promotion agency, which he led from 2018 to 2020, recording growth in country FDI figures every year. Previously, he headed trade and investment policy at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland (2014-2018), tasked with bringing together business and governments on international trade and investment dialogues and action calls in Davos –and globally– while spearheading the substantive work of the Forum on trade and FDI. He was also a member of the B20, the business forum of the G20. Before WEF, Cristián served at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, including as the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) lead negotiator on trade and environment, and on the investment and trade in services negotiations of the deal. He also represented Chile before the UN, OECD, WTO, APEC, the UNFCCC’s COPs (climate change), and other fora.

Cristián serves on the boards of Start-Up Chile –the leading start-up accelerator in Latin America–, the Harvard Academic Forum for the new Chilean constitution, Chapter Zero Chile, and the global Climate Governance Initiative, where he chairs the governance committee. He is the author of a number of publications on international trade and investment, including the Elgar Companion on the WTO that he co-edited (forthcoming, 2022).

He holds a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School, a Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, B.A. in Law from the University of Concepción (Chile), and an executive masters in global leadership from the World Economic Forum and INSEAD. Cristián is a Chilean and a Swiss national.