Ambassador Sarah Mendelson is Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and Head of CMU’s Heinz College in DC. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow with the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. She served from 2015-2017 as the US Representative to the UN’s ECOSOC leading on global development, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. She served from 2010-2014 as a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance where she was the Agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance. For over twenty-five years, she has worked on development and human rights as a scholar and practitioner. She spent over a decade at CSIS as a senior adviser and the inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative as well as a senior fellow in CSIS’s Russia and Eurasia Program. Her current research focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and the Packard Foundation. She recently served on the Freedom House-CSIS-McCain Institute Task Force on “A New U.S. Strategy to Promote Democracy and Combat Authoritarianism.” Ambassador Mendelson received her BA in history from Yale University and her PhD in political science from Columbia University.
Ambassador Sarah Mendelson will participate in the World Justice Forum working session Localizing the SDGs and Creating More Just and Equitable Communities