FORUM: Ambassador Phillip T. Reeker

Summary: Ambassador Phillip T. Reeker (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs, Washington, DC) will discuss the complex history and politics of the Balkans from the Bosnian war in the early 1990s to the encouraging developments of the present.

Bio: A career foreign service officer, Ambassador Philip T. Reeker assumed his current position as deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs on August 8, 2011. He supervises the office of South-Central European Affairs and is responsible for U.S. relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Reeker served as U.S. ambassador to Macedonia from September 2008 until August 2011. From June 2007 until June 2008, he served at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq as the counselor to the ambassador for public affairs. He was the deputy chief of mission in Budapest, Hungary from 2004 to 2007. He also served as deputy spokesman and deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Public Affairs from 2000 to 2003. In 2003, he received the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy and traveled domestically and internationally as the “Spokesman at Large” for the State Department, giving talks and interviews on U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy from 2003 to 2004. Other State Department positions include director of press relations from 1999 to 2000; assistant information officer in Budapest, Hungary from 1993 to 1996; and as the public affairs officer in Skopje, Macedonia from 1997 to 1999. Born in Pennsylvania, Ambassador Reeker grew up in several parts of the U.S. and in Australia. He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1986 and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of International Management in 1991.