Ambassador Sarah E. Mendelson has served as a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University as well as Head of CMU’s Heinz College in Washington DC since 2018.  At CMU, she co-chairs the University’s Sustainability Initiative 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 and a board member of the Free Russia Foundation.   

She served from 2015-2017 as the US Representative to the UN’s ECOSOC. There she led on international development, human rights, humanitarian affairs, and combating human trafficking. Prior to her appointment, she served as a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance from 2010-2014 where she was the Agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance. 

A long-time policy entrepreneur, she has spent over twenty-five years working on development and human rights as a scholar and a practitioner including a decade at the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a senior adviser and the inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative. She also worked as a senior fellow in CSIS’s Russia and Eurasia Program.  

Her current work centers on the creation of a community of practice dedicated to growing the next generation of human rights experts, activists, practitioners, and scholars through teaching and researching the Sustainable Development Goals.  

The author of over 70 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.