Dr. Carolyn Deere Birkbeck is the Director of the Forum on Trade, Environment and the SDGs, a partnership between the Graduate Institute and UNEP, housed at the Geneva Trade Platform.  She is also a Senior Researcher at the Institute's Global Governance Centre, where she leads a research project on the political economy and regulation of the global plastics economy, supported by the Swiss Network of International Studies. She is an Associate Fellow of the Chatham House and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford's Global Economic Governance Programme.

Dr. Deere Birkbeck is the founder and Board Chair of Global Policy Reporting, a Geneva-based non-profit organisation dedicated to open access, independent and professional news reporting, which houses Health Policy Watch (launched in 2019) and Intellectual Property Watch for the prior 15 years

Before moving to academia, Dr. Deere Birkbeck served as an Assistant Director at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York where she was responsible for grantmaking on intellectual property, trade and sustainable development. During this time, Dr. Deere Birkbeck also co-founded the Funders Network on Trade and Globalization (FNTG) and served on its Steering Committee. Previously, she worked in Washington, D.C. for the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and as the Manager of the Congressional Staff Forum on International Development at the Overseas Development Council. She has been a consultant to a range of non-governmental and international organisations, including UNEP, UNCTAD, Chatham House, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the Commonwealth Secretariat, UNDP’s Office of the Human Development Report, the National Wildlife Federation, the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, the Open Society Institute, the South Centre and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD).