Ambassador Gregory W. Engle (Ret.) is a Strauss Center Distinguished Scholar and previously served as the Strauss Center’s Associate Director.  Prior to that, he served as the Senior Advisor for International Affairs at the International Office of the University of Texas at Austin.  He is currently serving as the Country Director of the Peace Corps’s Ethiopia program.

Ambassador Engle previously served as the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomat-in-Residence at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, following a thirteen month assignment as Management Counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.  Before serving in Iraq, he was the U.S. Ambassador to the Togolese Republic.

Ambassador Engle joined the Foreign Service (U.S. Department of State) in 1981, following a tour as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea. He has served in management positions in Pakistan, Germany, Washington, Ethiopia, and Cyprus. He was the recipient of the State Department’s Leamon R. Hunt Award for Administrative Excellence in 1990.

Following his assignment in Cyprus, Ambassador Engle served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Lilongwe, Malawi, from 1992 to 1995. Upon leaving Malawi, he was a member of the Foreign Service Institute’s 38th Senior Seminar. From 1996 to 1999, he was U.S. Consul General in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Returning to Washington, Ambassador Engle served as Director of International Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS) from 1999 to 2001, Special Coordinator for the African Crisis Response Initiative from 2001 to 2002, and Director of the Office of Regional and Security Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs from 2002 to 2003.

Ambassador Engle received a BA in Political Science and an MPA from the University of Colorado. He is married and has two children.