User:Patrick Mendis/Bio

Dr. Patrick Mendis is an affiliate professor of public and international affairs (PIA) at George Mason University. He served as the vice president of academic affairs at the Osgood Center for International Studies and a visiting foreign policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). While at SAIS, he authored two books: TRADE for PEACE (foreword by Professor Brian Atwood, dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota) and Commercial Providence: The Secret Destiny of the American Empire (foreword by Professor Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of the George Washington University). Dr. Mendis serves as an editorial board member of The Public Manager and a senior fellow of the Osgood Center for International Studies.

Before returning to academia, Professor Mendis served as an American diplomat at the U.S. Department of State where he chaired a number of U.S. interagency policy working groups, managed the Department’s international educational and cultural programs, advised the U.S. Delegations to the United Nations, and served as vice chair of the Secretary Colin Powell’s Open Forum. After his diplomatic assignment, for which he earned the Department’s Meritorious Honor Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award, Dr. Mendis served as a consulting economist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Prior to joining the State Department, he served as a military professor in the NATO and Pacific Commands of the U.S. Department of Defense through the University of Maryland. He also lectured at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute and served as a board member of the USDA Graduate School, an appointment by the Bush administration.

Dr. Mendis was a visiting professor of economics and public policy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea program and authored a book based on his voyage, Glocalization: The Human Side of Globalization as If the Washington Consensus Mattered (foreword by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the late science-fiction writer). His other professional and teaching experience includes positions in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, and the United Nations as well as in the Universities of Minnesota, Norwich, Columbia, Yale, and the George Washington University.

As a 21st Century Trust fellow, Dr. Mendis attended Oxford University’s Merton College and is an alumnus of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He earned his PhD in geography and applied economics from the University of Minnesota, MA in international development and foreign affairs from the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, and BS in business administration and economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Sri Lanka. A fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, he was the first recipient of the University of Maryland’s Stanley Drazek Teaching Excellence Award and the University Minnesota’s Humphrey Award for Outstanding Leadership. Author of more than 100 books, journal articles, newspaper columns, and government reports, Dr. Mendis has lived, traveled, and worked in more than 75 countries and visited all 50 states. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his family.