Sarah E. Mendelson

Ambassador Sarah E. Mendelson is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for Sustainable Development in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. She is also distinguished service professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and director of CMU’s Sustainable Futures. At CMU, she also co-chairs the university’s steering committee on sustainability and is a co-chair of SDSN USA.

She previously served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). There she led on international development, human rights, human trafficking, and humanitarian affairs. Prior to her appointment, she served as a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance from 2010 to 2014 where she was the agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance.

A long-time policy entrepreneur, she has spent 30 years working on development and human rights as a scholar and a practitioner. She spent over a decade at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) 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 overseeing focus groups, public opinion surveys, and social marketing campaigns in Russia.

Her current work centers on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She is the editor of a recent volume exploring how to reframe human rights using the SDGs. She is working in close collaboration with colleagues from CMU as well as a community of practice she leads on how artificial intelligence might help accelerate work on the SDGs in local communities with a particular focus on addressing socioeconomic needs.

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