Thomas O. Melia

Board Chairman

Thomas O. Melia, Chairman of the Board of Free Russia Foundation, is senior fellow in the Center for Democracy and Governance at Georgetown University. Until 2025, Melia was senior foreign policy advisor to U. S. Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Maryland), who concluded his distinguished career as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Melia served in the Obama Administration as USAID’s Assistant Administrator for Europe and Eurasia and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in DRL, overseeing the Bureau’s work in the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He was U.S. co-chair of the working group on civil society in the bilateral U.S.-Russia Strategic Framework until he announced the closure of the working group in January 2013 due to Russia’s mounting attacks on civil society.

From 2005 to 2010, Melia was vice president of Freedom House and later directed the Washington office of the literary organization PEN America from 2018–2021.

From 1988 to 2001, he worked at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) where he was an international observer to the first partially free elections in the USSR, in 1989.

Melia earned his BA from The Johns Hopkins University and his MA from JHU’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He has been a visiting professor at his alma mater, as well as at Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon and Princeton Universities.