New Permanent Representative of United States Presents Credentials

(Based on information provided by the Protocol and Liaison Service)

The new Permanent Representative of the United States to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, presented her credentials to the Secretariat and paid a courtesy call on UN Secretary-General António Guterres today.

Before her latest appointment, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, a career diplomat for 35 years, was her country’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 2013 to 2017, leading the bureau focused on the development and management of United States policy towards sub-Saharan Africa.

From 2012 to 2013, she served as Director-General of the United States Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources, leading a team in charge of the Department of State’s 70,000-strong workforce.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield’s foreign postings included a term as Ambassador to Liberia from 2008 to 2012 and another at the United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva.  She also served in Pakistan, Kenya, the Gambia, Nigeria and Jamaica.

In Washington, D.C., she was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of African Affairs from 2006 to 2008 and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration from 2004 until 2006.

After retiring from the State Department in 2017, Ms. Thomas-Greenfield led the Africa Practice at Albright Stonebridge Group, a strategic commercial diplomacy firm chaired by Madeleine Albright, a former Secretary of State.  She was the inaugural Distinguished Resident Fellow in African Studies at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in Washington, D.C., from 2017 to 2019.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University and a master’s from the University of Wisconsin, which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 2018, and an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Liberia, presented in 2012.