Lynda Nwike

Graduate Student Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School of Government

As a mechanical engineering graduate from King’s College London, Lynda began her career in 2010 in Public and Government Affairs at ExxonMobil where she built and maintained relationships with local stakeholders around the company’s refining operations in the South of England. She later moved to Schlumberger, an oilfield services company, where she had the tremendous opportunity to work in locations and on offshore platforms spanning, Europe, the US, The Middle East and Africa with a diverse range of clients.

From there, she worked for Royal Dutch Shell for seven years, starting out as a wellsite drilling engineer on the iconic Brent oil platforms, before working in a variety of roles including Engineering, Contracts, Project Management and Operations Management where she led international teams of 100+ people on the Norwegian continental shelf.

Given the global nature of her work and curious as to the reasons behind the varying economic outcomes that she had observed during her time in the oil and gas industry, she wanted to both deepen her skills as a business leader as well as build her skill set in economics to understand the dynamics and global economic issues surrounding the natural resources industry.

She commenced a double master’s programme at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Aug 2021. During her first summer internship, she worked with Rio Tinto as an International Affairs and Strategy Intern in the company’s newly formed Battery Materials and Critical Minerals team. Here she had the opportunity to grapple with some of the national, bilateral, and multilateral strategies, policies, risks, and geopolitical events that are defining critical mineral supply chains globally.

She is due to graduate in May 2024