Tini Tran is Director for Global Communications and Engagement at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. She is responsible for global communications and outreach efforts across multiple channels (web, social media, blog, learning platforms, publications, and media relations) around urban sustainability issues. She provides strategic guidance on the Center's global influence strategy and coordinates a team of communications staff in the U.S. and worldwide.

Tini was an international development practitioner and a veteran foreign correspondent before joining WRI. She worked as a journalist for 18 years, both in the U.S. and abroad. She worked at several newspapers including the Los Angeles Times before moving overseas to Hanoi in 1999 to join The Associated Press. She served as AP’s Vietnam Bureau Chief from 2001-2006, becoming the first Vietnamese American allowed to join the foreign press corps there. She also reported extensively across the Asia region, including covering conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. She was selected for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 2006-2007, before moving to Beijing, where she covered the economic and political rise of China as a senior correspondent. More recently, she moved into the nonprofit development sector where she served as program advisor at The Asia Foundation’s China office from 2013-2016, where she helped oversee programs on environmental protection, disaster management, and international and regional cooperation, as well as being responsible for media and communications strategy.

She has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and a Bachelor’s degree in journalism and government from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and daughter.