John Rodgers, a KU CREES alum, will speak about his experiences and provide advice to students about pursing a similar professional path.

John Rodgers served in the U.S. Government from 1986 to 2015. He began his career as a political analyst for East European Affairs and witnessed the collapse of the communist systems in Eastern Europe and the reestablishment of democracy in those countries.

Mr. Rodgers joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1990. He served as a Consular Officer and then an Economic Officer in his foreign assignments, which included work in the U.S. Embassies and Consulates in Copenhagen, Denmark; Bridgetown, Barbados; Hamburg, Germany; Bucharest, Romania; and Berlin, Germany. While overseas, his duties included visa issuance, trade and banking policy, telecommunication and Internet policy, terrorist finance monitoring, energy affairs and management of Economic Sections.

His domestic assignments in the U.S. Department of State included work in the Baltic Task Force, which monitored the former Soviet Republics as they broke away from the Soviet Union; Energy Officer in Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, Delegation leader for Telecommunication Policy at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC; Trade Officer for the U.S.
delegation to the APEC forum, and Analyst for Russian affairs. His final assignment was as Professor and Department of State Chair at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.
His academic background includes receiving an MA in Soviet and East European Affairs, University of Kansas; an MA in German Language and Literature, University of Kansas, and a BA in History, University of Kansas. He studied overseas at the Universities of Erlangen and Stuttgart, Germany. He completed an intensive nine-month economics course at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

He is fluent in German and learned Danish and Romanian while in the Foreign Service. He studied Russian as a literary language while at the University of Kansas. He has taken courses in Italian and French at the University of Kansas since retirement