Mark C. Storella, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, was sworn in as ambassador to Zambia on August 30, 2010.  Zambia has one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in the world, and Storella has substantial experience in global public health efforts. His public health experience came in Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked on the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he helped on the effort to combat HIV/AIDS. He serves simultaneously as the U.S. Representative to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). 

 

Storella earned his A.B. degree from Harvard College and an M.A. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He joined the Foreign Service in 1985. His early assignments included postings in Rome, Italy, and Bangkok, Thailand. He served in Paris, France, from 1989 to 1991 as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Conference on Cambodia, and followed that from 1991 to 1994 by serving as political officer in Phnom Penh, where he helped reestablish the U.S. diplomatic presence in Cambodia after a 17-year absence.

 

After serving in the State Department’s Office of the Counselor, Storella was a Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University in 2001 and 2002, where he taught graduate and undergraduate courses on humanitarian intervention. He then returned to the Embassy in Phnom Penh as Deputy Chief of Mission from 2003 to 2006. He served in Geneva from 2006 to 2009, first as Counselor for Refugee and Migration Affairs (2006 to 2007), and then as Deputy Permanent Representative and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and other International Organizations (2007 to 2009). From 2009 to early 2010, he served as the Senior Coordinator for Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, where he helped administer hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian assistance. In Washington, Storella has worked at the NATO and Japan desks, and as Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State.

 

Storella is the author of monographs and articles on such diverse topics as multilateral arms control, humanitarianism in conflict situations and U.S.-Japan trade. His foreign languages are French, Khmer, Italian and Thai. He is married and has two sons.

- Matt Bewig

 

Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (pdf)