Christopher Sands is a leading specialist on Canada, U.S.–Canada relations, and North American economic integration. His most recent book, coedited with David M. Thomas, is Canada and the United States: Differences That Count (5th ed., University of Toronto Press, 2023).

Sands is a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he directs the Hopkins Center for Canadian Studies. He also serves as lecturer and course coordinator of the Canada Seminar at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. He 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’s Canadian Studies Program. He was a founding officer of the Canadian Politics Section of the American Political Science Association and serves on the editorial board of the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal.

Earlier in his academic career, Sands taught at American University’s School of Public Affairs and at Western Washington University’s College of Business and Economics. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1999–2000 to conduct research at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. In 2019, he was named a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

Although often mistaken for a Canadian, Sands was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

Sands was an event speaker at the Dialogue.