The transition team of President-elect Joe Biden announced that Linda Thomas-Greenfield will serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
Thomas-Greenfield earned a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 and was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from UW in 2018, a year after she retired following a 35-year career in foreign service.
From 2013 to 2017 she served as the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, where she led the bureau focused on the development and management of U.S. policy toward sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to this appointment, she served as Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources (2012-2013), leading a team in charge of the State Department’s 70,000-strong workforce.
Thomas-Greenfield served as ambassadorship to Liberia from 2008 to 2012, and spent time posted in Switzerland (at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations), Pakistan, Kenya, The Gambia, Nigeria, and Jamaica. In Washington, she served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of African Affairs from 2006-2008, and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration from 2004-2006.
Since 2017, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield has led the Africa Practice at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategic commercial diplomacy firm chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She was also the inaugural Distinguished Resident Fellow in African Studies at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy from fall 2017 to spring 2019. She joined ISD in spring 2017 as a Senior State Department Fellow.
Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield earned a B.A. from Louisiana State University.
