Geeta Pasi was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to Chad on June 29, 2016. It’s the second such post for Pasi, a career member of the Foreign Service.

Originally from New York, Pasi received her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Duke University in 1984 and, two years later, she earned a Master of Arts in French studies from New York University.

Before joining the Foreign Service in 1988, Pasi worked as an institutional financial market researcher in New York.

Her early overseas assignments include serving as political and economic officer at the U.S. Consulate in Douala, Cameroon and human rights and consular officer in Bucharest, Romania in 1991, after the 1989 fall of President Nicolae Ceaușescu. Pasi was political officer in Accra, Ghana, from 1995 to 1997 as that nation held its first democratic elections; and political military officer at the embassy in New Delhi, India, from 1998 to 2001. She also served in Washington as desk officer for Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, and from 1994 to 1995 as a line officer in the Executive Secretariat.

She began work at the Afghanistan desk on July 30, 2001, while the Taliban were still in power. Less than two and a half months later, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Beginning in 2003, Pasi served as deputy principal officer and acting consul general at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. From 2006 to 2009, she was the deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, after which she returned to Washington as Director of the Office of East African Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs.

Pasi’s first tenure as Ambassador came in 2011, when she was named to head the mission to the strategically important country of Djibouti, the East African home of a major U.S. military base. Shortly after her arrival, she presided over the opening of a new U.S. Embassy complex there. Since leaving Djibouti in 2014, Pasi has served as Director of the Office of Career Development in the Bureau of Human Resources.

Pasi speaks French, Hindi, Romanian and German.

-Steve Straehley and Noel Brinkerhoff

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