Expert Bio

Christopher Sands, Director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute, is a specialist on Canada, US-Canadian relations, and North American economic integration.  He is the co-host of the Canusa Street podcast and a regular panelist on the Wilson Center’s Americas 360 podcast. His most recent book, co-edited with David M. Thomas, is Canada and the United States: Differences That Count (Fifth edition, University of Toronto Press, 2023). Dr. Sands is a board member of the Canada-United States Law Institute, the Institute for Research on Public Policy, the Macdonald Laurier Institute, and the University of California Berkeley Canadian Studies Program. He was a founding member and officer of the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and he is a member of the editorial board for the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. 

Dr. Sands is a Lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and directs the Hopkins Center for Canadian Studies. He is a Lecturer and Course Coordinator of the Canada Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, he taught in the School of Public Affairs at American University and in the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University. In 1999-2000 he received a Fulbright scholarship to work on his doctoral dissertation at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, and in 2019 he was named a Senior Fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto. Although frequently mistaken for a Canadian, he was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.