Sarah E. Mendelson

Board Member

Ambassador Sarah E. Mendelson has served as a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University since 2018. Beginning in September 2024, she is also Director, Sustainable Futures. From January 2018-August 2024, she was Head of CMU’s Heinz College in Washington, DC.

At CMU, she co-chairs the University’s steering committee overseeing work on Sustainability and is a faculty affiliate of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow with the Center for Sustainable Development in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, a co-chair of SDSN USA, and a board member of the Free Russia Foundation.

From 2015–2017, Ambassador Mendelson served as the US Representative to the UN’s ECOSOC and as an alternate delegate from the United States to the UN’s General Assembly.

She served as a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID from 2010–2014 where she was the Agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance. She has spent over 30 years working on development and human rights as a scholar and practitioner including in Moscow with the National Democratic Institute, on the faculty of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and over a decade as senior adviser and inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The author of over 100 scholarly and public policy publications, Ambassador Mendelson received her BA in history from Yale University and her PhD in political science from Columbia University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.