Christine Raetsch currently serves as Duolingo's first Head of People, building the company's HR practice. Duolingo is the most popular language-learning platform worldwide, with over 300 million users and the mission to make education free and accessible to all.
Prior to joining Duolingo, Christine was a senior executive at Vanguard, where she spent the first 20 years of her career. In her last role at Vanguard, she served as the Global Head of Culture and Inclusion, where she created and led the center of expertise on culture, employee engagement, diversity, and inclusion for Vanguard's 15,000+ global employees. In addition to HR, Christine had roles in client management (managing a $50B book of business), risk management (creating the risk management program for our largest division), operations management (leading a team of 250+ employees), and process improvement (earning a Six Sigma Black Belt designation).
Christine received her M.B.A. and M.A. from Villanova University. She maintains the GPHR and SHRM-SCP HR professional designations.
Christine is passionate about making her community strong and vibrant. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, and is a partner with Social Venture Partners Pittsburgh, a non-profit accelerator. She also provides HR consulting for many arts- and culture-focused non-profits in the Pittsburgh region. In what remains of her free time, she loves being outside: biking, running, playing tennis, and kayaking on all the great rivers in Pittsburgh. As a relative newcomer to the Pittsburgh area, Christine is enjoying all that Pittsburgh has to offer in terms of arts, culture, the outdoors, and so much more!
