Robert R. Gosende resides in Guilderland, NY. He works with colleges and universities across the U.S. advising on international education activities and programs. He was Diplomat in Residence and Special Assistant to the President for Internationalization at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY during the 2012/13 academic year. He served as the John W. Ryan Fellow in Public Diplomacy and Visiting Professor in the School of Education at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, 2010-2012. From 1998 – 2010 he was Associate Vice Chancellor and Senior International Office at SUNY’s System Administration.
As SUNY’s Senior International Officer, Mr. Gosende was responsible for overseeing international programs across SUNY’s sixty-four campus system. He and his staff worked closely with faculty and administrators to assist them with their Study Abroad Programs and with international student enrollment. He was also responsible for assisting campuses as they developed joint academic programming with universities abroad. Under his leadership the Office of International Programs, which he founded, established overseas branches in Turkey, the Russian Federation, Poland and Mexico where The State University has developed dual diploma programs which now enable over 2,000 State University and international university students to complete their undergraduate study jointly and receive their degrees from both institutions.
Mr. Gosende served for thirty-six years in the Foreign Service of the United States in the U.S. Information Agency and the Department of State before joining SUNY in December of 1998. Mr. Gosende's overseas experience includes tours of duty as a Cultural Affairs Officer in Libya, Somalia, and Poland and as Minister-Counselor for Public Affairs in South Africa and in the Russian Federation. He served as President Clinton's Special Envoy for Somalia, with the personal rank of Ambassador, at the height of the security and humanitarian crisis in that country in 1992-93. On tours of duty in Washington, D.C., he served as the Associate Director of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Information Agency and as that Agency's Deputy Director and Director for Sub-Saharan African Affairs. During 1994 he was Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, directing the U.S. Government's education and public affairs activities in support of the first multi-racial elections held in South Africa in April of that year.
Mr. Gosende was a Fellow at the Center for International Affairs and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University in 1978/79. For the fall semester of 1992, Mr. Gosende served as a Diplomat in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service teaching an undergraduate/graduate course in Public Diplomacy and conducting seminars on Southern African and Eastern European Affairs. Mr. Gosende served as the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University during 1994-95. While at Fletcher he taught courses on Public Diplomacy and initiated two research projects with Fletcher and the Woodrow Wilson School of International Studies at Princeton University which explored the lessons learned from the U.S. intervention in Somalia and the role of ethnicity and self-determination in national and international affairs in the post-Cold War era.