Patrick Mendis is an educator,[1] diplomat,[2] author,[3] and executive in government service.[4] He taught MBA/MPA as well as international trade and American foreign policy courses at the University of Minnesota, University of Maryland University College, and Yale University before joining the U.S. Department of State, where he served under Secretaries Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell. For his leadership, Mendis was honored with the State Department's Meritorious Honor Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award. Previously, he worked at the Minnesota House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Mendis is currently an affiliate professor of public and international affairs[5] at George Mason University and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
Mendis has authored more than 100 journal articles, government reports, newspaper columns, and several books, including most recently, Commercial Providence: The Secret Destiny of the American Empire (2010)[6] as well as TRADE for PEACE: How the DNA of America, Freemasonry, and Providence Created a New World Order with Nobody in Charge (2009). Professor Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus of the George Washington University and Professor J. Brian Atwood, dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs respectively wrote the forewords for these two internationally acclaimed books.[7]
After his government service in the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and State, Mendis returned to academia.[8] He served as the vice president of the Osgood Center for International Studies and as a foreign policy visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. An adjunct professor of international diplomacy at Norwich University, Mendis is an alumnus of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Since 2010, he has been elected to serve on the board of the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Alumni DC Council in Washington.
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Patrick Mendis was born in the medieval capital of Polonnaruwa in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and grew up in Minnesota, USA. He was a Boy Scout, a Sarvodaya volunteer, a Police Cadets sergeant, and a commander of the Army Cadets Corps of Sri Lanka. At Sarvodaya, Mendis worked with his mentor, A. T. Ariyaratne, the "Gandhi of Sri Lanka" and founder of Sarvodaya and later established a number of tsunami scholarships and the Sarvodaya Peace Prize.[9] For his contributions to his native country, Mendis is recognized with the UNESCO Award sponsored by the United Nations Association of Sri Lanka, the Sarvodaya International Peace Award, and the Sri Lanka Foundation's Outstanding Leadership Award for International Diplomacy (in Los Angeles, California, USA).
At the age of 18, he won one of the nine AFS scholarships among over 100,000 applicants in Sri Lanka and attended American high school in Perham, Minnesota. At the end of his graduation in 1979, Mendis traveled by bus to Washington, D.C., where he met President Jimmy Carter's Vice President Walter Mondale (D-Minnesota) and U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minnesota), who have been friends and supporters of Mendis all these years. After receiving his American diploma from Perham High School in Minnesota, he returned to the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, where Mendis endowed two annual scholarships in leadership and management studies in 1993.[10] Mendis served as the vice president of the World University Service, the president of the University Sports Council, and a member of the University’s badminton, athletic, and swimming teams for which he won the University Colours. He earned his BS in business administration and economics (First Class Honours) before he returned to the United States on scholarship for graduate studies at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
In Minnesota, he worked in the Minnesota House of Representatives with the parliamentarian and chief clerk of the Minnesota House of Representatives Edward A. Burdick, who later became an "adopted" father to Mendis for more than 25 years (Honorable Burdick passed away in 2011).[11] During these years, Mendis studied under the late NATO Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, the founding dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and served as his special assistant when Cleveland became the president of the World Academy of Art and Science.[12]
After earning his PhD in Geography/Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota in 1989, Mendis served as a Lecturer in International Relations and a Visiting Scholar in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota from 1990 to 1997. During his tenure, Mendis worked with the late Regents Professor Vernon Ruttan and authored a book, Human Environment and Spatial Relations in Agricultural Production and four Staff Papers published by the University of Minnesota's Department of Applied Economics.
Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Mendis raised fund for a number of tsunami projects in Sri Lanka in working with the Embassy of Sri Lanka and the Harvard University Club of Washington, D.C.[13] He has established a range of tsunami scholarships, a micro-loan program, and a peace prize in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the Calvert Foundation in Maryland, USA.[14]
Before attending the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Mendis worked at the Minnesota House of Representatives under Honorable Edward A. Burdick, the chief clerk and parliamentarian of the House.[15] He also served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minnesota) dealing with the Middle East and Asian affairs.
Mendis obtained his MA in international development and foreign affairs from the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs in 1986. At the graduation ceremony, he received the first Hubert H. Humphrey Alumni Award for Outstanding Leadership. Other three Humphrey Leadership Award recipients were U.S. Vice President Walter Mondale (under President Jimmy Carter), President Ronald Reagan's Ambassador Max Kampelman, and UNEP Executive Director Mustafa Tolba.
With Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, Mendis represented the Government of Sri Lanka as “Youth Ambassador” at the 1985 UN International Year of the Youth (IYY) in New York. It was a political appointment by the Government of Sri Lanka (at the suggestion of the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa to honor Mendis' service at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. Professor Karunasena Koddituwakku, the Vice Chancellor of the University, recommended Mendis to the Minister of Youth and Sports Affairs, Ranil Wickramasinghe, who later became the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. Mendis also worked at the World Bank and served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State after representing the Government of Sri Lanka at the UN, where he received the UN Medal for the IYY.
In Minnesota, Mendis served as the President of the Society for International Development, the Vice President of the United Nations Association of the United States of America, a public speaker at the Minnesota International Center and the Founding Chairman of The Saint Paul Foundation’s Asian-Pacific Endowment for Community Development.
Ambassador Harlan Cleveland, the President of World Academy of Art and Science, appointed Mendis as an associate fellow of the Academy in 1994. In the same year, he was elected as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (Saint Paul-Minneapolis Committee). In 2000, Mendis was elected as a fellow of the World Academy. He currently serves as an executive committee member of the Geneva-based World Network of Young Leaders and Entrepreneurs.[16]
For his leadership and scholarship, he received the State of Minnesota’s Asian-Pacific Heritage Award, the Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich's Certificate of Honorary Citizenship, the Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen Award for United Nations Affairs, the University of Minnesota President’s Leadership and Service Award, and the 21st Century Trust Fellowship to attend the Merton College at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.[17]
After becoming a naturalized United States citizen, Mendis served as a military professor through the University of Maryland University College. He taught MBA/MPA and International Relations courses to American military forces in the NATO and Pacific Commands of the U.S. Department of Defense (in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom). For his service to Pentagon, Mendis received UMUC’s Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence Award.[18]
Mendis joined the U.S. Department of State in 2000 as a foreign affairs officer to serve under Secretary Madeleine Albright. Under her direction, he served as the chairman of the U.S. Government Inter-agency Policy Working Group on Sustainable Development and the science & technology coordinator for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under President Bill Clinton. When Secretary Colin Powell came to the State Department, Mendis was appointed as the secretariat director of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (former U.S. Information Agency) and a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for ECA under President George W. Bush. Mendis was also elected by both State and USAID civilian and foreign service employees to serve as the vice chairman of Secretary Colin Powell’s Open Forum.
Later, Mendis was invited to participate as a consultant and economist in a multi-year science and national security project, headed by Ambassador Ronald Lehman, the Director of the Center for Global Security Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.[19] Ambassador Lehman and Professor Mendis worked on a number of national security projects, including one involving the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction writer, who lived in Sri Lanka. Sri Clarke, a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, wrote the foreword for Mendis' book on Glocalization.[20]
To transform the U.S. Government national security decision-making process in the 21st century, Patrick Mendis authored (with Leah Green) the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement case study for the Project on National Security Reform, a nonpartisan non-profit organization mandated by the United States Congress to recommend improvements to the U.S. national security system.[21]
Mendis also served as an Uhuru ‘Freedom’ Fellow at the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the governing board of the USDA Graduate School, an appointment by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and the White House.[22] He serves on the editorial board of The Public Manager.[23]
Through the University of Maryland University College's faculty exchange program, Professor Mendis taught courses in American government, English, and culture to Chinese students at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xian.[24] He traveled throughout China, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Tibet. After publishing his latest two books, TRADE for PEACE and Commercial Providence, Mendis was invited to China to give a series of lectures at prestigious universities in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Nanjing, and Shanghai.[25] The Center for International Strategic and Security Studies at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies has appointed him as a consulting professor of international relations. Professor Mendis is an advisor to The Encyclopedia of Sri Lanka Diaspora project at the National University of Singapore.
While at the University of Minnesota, he also led the U.S. team selected to teach market economics and management to a group of former KGB officers, young Russian entrepreneurs, and faculty members at Saint Petersburg State University (previously known as Leningrad State University in the former Soviet Union). During the historic 1991 summer in the former Soviet Union, Professor Mendis also lectured at the Moscow State University and toured the Kremlin and the Russian White House in Moscow.
As a visiting professor of economics and public policy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea (SAS) program, Professor Mendis traveled to the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Based on his first-hand observations of globalization and Americanization, he authored a series of articles, which later expanded into a book, the Human Side of Globalization,[26] in which he explained his experience in meeting with Fidel Castro of Cuba in 2004. He has worked in, and traveled to, more than 80 countries and visited all 50 states in the United States.
Proceeds from the sales of his latest two books -- Human Side of Globalization and TRADE for PEACE -- are donated to establish scholarships and a peace prize in Sri Lanka and a number of microloan projects through Kiva.org in more than thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Through his latest book Commercial Providence Mendis has contributed additional funds for his philanthropic activities.[27] He and his family live in the Washington, D.C., area in the United States.