Christopher Sands is senior research professor and director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Sands is concurrently the G. Robert Ross Distinguished Visiting Professor of Canada–U.S. Business and Economic Relations in the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University. He also taught in the School of Public Affairs and the School of International Service at American University (2005–12).

His teaching career was preceded by twenty-two years in Washington think tanks as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and as the Canada project coordinator and then director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he was recently appointed a senior associate to advise on the Americas Program about Canadian and North American issues.

Sands is a fellow of the Border Policy Research Institute in Bellingham, Washington, and serves on the advisory boards for the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Ottawa and for the Canada–United States Law Institute (a joint venture of the law faculties of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and Western University in London, Ontario). His work has been published by several of Washington’s leading think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Center for the Study of the Presidency, the Migration Policy Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

He received a BA in political science from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, an MA in international economics and Canadian studies and a PhD in international relations from SAIS at Johns Hopkins University, and he was a Fulbright scholar at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.