Patricia Sulser ’79 Lawyer and Independent Consultant
She was previously Chief Counsel in International Finance Corporation’s legal department and the Global Lead Lawyer and member of the management team for IFC InfraVentures, an IFC internally managed fund dedicated to early stage infrastructure project development and sponsorship. Her primary practice has been global infrastructure and public private partnerships. Prior to IFC, Patricia was a lawyer with Shearman & Sterling’s New York, Hong Kong and London offices, where she worked on some of the earliest renewable energy project financings implemented by Citibank. She is committed to international development and the dual global goals of eliminating poverty and boosting shared prosperity, with all that achievement of these goals can bring to the world. She synthesized her experience in this space in a recent book entitled Infrastructure PPPs in the most challenging countries: Closing the gap, published by the International Financial Law Review.
Since Patricia left IFC in 2019, she is delighted to be sharing her rich experience in the international development space and her legal expertise with IFC and a variety of other development finance institutions, start-ups and charitable organizations dedicated to providing critical infrastructure and services to people in developing countries and thereby improving development outcomes.
Patricia is also a certified mediator and an arbitrator. She is a proud member of the faculty and an advisory committee member of the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs at Wellesley College. She was also privileged to serve as a faculty member for the Women in Public Service Project launched by Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Seven Sisters Colleges some years ago.
She graduated from Wellesley College in 1979 with an English Literature BA and received her JD from The Washington College of Law, The American University, in Washington, DC, where she was the Senior Notes and Comments Editor on the Law Review. She grew up on Long Island, New York. Her older daughter is a student at Wellesley College.