United States Ambassador to Uganda Deborah Malac will speak on the campus of Furman University Wednesday, Sept. 28th at 7:00 pm in Shaw Hall of the Melvin and Dollie Younts Conference Center.
Her talk, “‘If you go in, you won’t come out’: Leading America’s Fight Against Ebola in Liberia,” is free and open to the public and is presented by Furman University’s Riley Institute. In addition to her public address, Malac will visit classes and meet informally with students as part of the Riley Institute’s Fellow in Residence program.
As then U.S. Ambassador to Liberia, Malac helped coordinate the U.S. response to the medical and humanitarian crisis following the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf urged President Barack Obama to assist the country. In response to the seriousness of the crisis and depth of need, President Obama expanded America’s response, sending 3,000 troops to support and assist civilian responders from the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Agency for International Development and a host of international partners.
Malac is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who has served with the Department of State since 1981. She moved to her current position as U.S. Ambassador to Uganda in February 2016, following her service as U.S. Ambassador to Liberia (2012-2015).
Prior to her recent assignments in Uganda and Liberia, Malac served as Director in the Office of East African Affairs at the State Department and was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She has also served at U.S. embassies in Senegal, Thailand, South Africa and Cameroon. During domestic assignments, Malac has worked on a diverse range of issues including career development for Foreign Service personnel, agricultural trade and development, biotechnology, textiles trade, food aid and food security and as desk officer for Laos and for South Africa.
Malac holds a bachelor’s in international studies (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Furman University (1977), a master’s in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia (1981), a master’s in national resources strategy (Distinguished Graduate) from the National Defense University (2002), and she spent a year studying international law at the University of Basel on a postgraduate fellowship. She also speaks French, German and Thai.
Learn more about the U.S. role in mitigating the Ebola crisis in a New York Times article.
(Written by Tina Underwood, Furman University Contributor.)