User:John A Matel

John A Matel

John Matel is a career Foreign Service office with the Department of State currently serving as Director of the policy office at International Information Programs.

His most recent overseas assignment was as Team Leader of the ePRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) at Al Asad Western Anbar, Iraq. Matel has been a career Foreign Service Officer since 1984. His posts have included, Brasilia (ACAO), Porto Alegre (PAO), Oslo (IO), Krakow (PAO) and Warsaw (IO). Mr. Matel served in Washington in the Operations Center and as public diplomacy country affairs officer for Russia. He was director of International Information Programs – Europe and Eurasia and subsequently director of the Worldwide Speakers Program.

In addition to his Foreign Service duties, John Matel owns working forests in Brunswick County, Virginia and is communications director for the Virginia Forestry Association Tree Farm Project, which has given him hands on experience in things like road construction, forest products marketing, work crew management and the environmental aspect of timber harvests.

Mr. Matel has an MA in history from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA with a marketing concentration from the University of Minnesota. In addition, he was State Department Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, where among other things he led a graduate seminar on the American image. His languages include: Portuguese, Norwegian and Polish, as well as studies in classical Greek and Latin.

His webpage is www.johnsonmatel.com/blog1.