A native of Pennsylvania, Patricia McMahon Hawkins has served as the United States Ambassador to the West African nation of Togo since August 22, 2008. Hawkins attended Barnard College in New York City and graduated from East Stroudsburg University with a BS in Education. She studied French at Georgetown University, the Université de Dijon, and NYU.

 

Before joining the Foreign Service, she taught in both elementary and secondary schools in France and Pennsylvania. She and her husband, Richard S.D. Hawkins, are career Foreign Service Officers.

 

Hawkins joined the United States International Communications Agency, later USIA, in 1980. At USIA headquarters in Washington, DC, she was the Country Affairs Officer for the eight countries of Francophone West Africa, and Policy Application and Coordination Officer (PACO) in the office of USIA’s Assistant Director. She also served as the Public Affairs Advisor to the US Delegation to the CSCE Conference on the Human Dimension, in Paris in 1989.

 

Her first tour was in Paris, where she served as the Assistant Information Officer and Deputy Press Attaché. She subsequently served as Information Officer in Kinshasa, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, as Public Affairs Officer in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as Cultural Affairs Officer in Bogotá, Colombia, as Counselor for Public Affairs in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where she also served briefly as acting deputy chief of mission and then for several months as Chargé d’Affaires.

 

In 2001, Hawkins was posted to the Dominican Republic as Counselor for Public Affairs. Her most recent assignments have been in Washington, DC, as Policy Application and Coordination Officer in the Office of Public Affairs of the Bureau of African Affairs, and as a Career Development Officer in the Bureau of Human Resources.

 

During a three-year hiatus from the Foreign Service, she served as the executive assistant to the president and CEO of Otis Elevator Company, in Farmington, Connecticut.

 

Hawkins has donated $4,000 to various Democratic candidates and causes, including the New Hampshire Democratic State Committee, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton, among others.

 

She and her husband, Richard S.D. Hawkins, have a son and a daughter. Richard Hawkins was the director of quality improvement for the Otis Elevator Company, when, in 1995, he decided to join the Foreign Service in order to spend more time with his family. At the time of his wife’s appointment as ambassador to Togo, however, he was a team leader in Iraq, imbedded with the 3rd Combat Brigade Team of the 3rd Division of the U.S. Army.