President Obama has nominated an Indian-American to the post of Ambassador of Malaysia.
If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Kamala Shirin Lakhdhir, 54, will be the fourth Indian-American in the U.S. Foreign Service nominated by the Obama administration as U.S. envoys to various countries. Ambassador Richard Verma to India and Atul Keshap to Sri Lanka and Maldives, were confirmed. Another, Geeta Pasi, nominated this April by Obama as ambassador to Chad, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
The White House sent Lakhdhir’s nomination to the Senate June 16.
Lakhdhir is the daughter of Mumbai-born Noor Lakhdhir who came to the U.S. in the 1950s, and married New Yorker Ann Lakhdhir in 1957.
She previously served as executive assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, a position she held from 2011 to 2015. Prior to that she was the U.S. Consul General in Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K., from 2009 to 2011.
She previously worked in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs as the director of the Office of Maritime Southeast Asia from 2007 to 2009 and as the special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2005 to 2006.
From 2001 to 2005, Lakhdhir was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
She also served on Capitol Hill, where from 2000 to 2001, she was a Pearson Fellow in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Asia and the Pacific Subcommittee and the House Financial Services Committee, Monetary Policy and Trade Subcommittee.
Lakhdhir joined the Foreign Service in 1991. From 1998 to 2000, she was deputy coordinator of the Taiwan Coordination Staff in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. She was a Line Officer in the Department’s Executive Secretariat from 1996 to 1998. She was also political officer in Indonesia and a consular officer in Saudi Arabia.
Lakhdhir has a B.A. from Harvard College and is an M.S. from the National War College.
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