Ambassador Dane F. Smith, Jr. is a consultant on international peace-building. In 2011 and 2012 he was Senior Advisor on Darfur in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan. In search of a peaceful solution to the Darfur conflict in Sudan, he led the drafting of a U.S. Government strategy on Darfur and played an important support role in negotiations in Qatar under the auspices of the UN-African Union Joint Mediation. Those talks led to the July 2011 signing of the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur by the Government of Sudan and the Liberation and Justice Movement, a prominent Darfur rebel group. From 2006 through 2009 he was a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Washington D.C., where he authored U.S. Peacefare: Organizing American Peace-Building Operations (Praeger: 2010). He is a member of the board of directors of the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction. In 2008, on behalf of BEFORE, a project of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and swisspeace, he led a multinational team to Guinea for a preliminary study of possible conflict prevention initiatives. From 2005 to 2010 and in 2013 he was Adjunct Professor in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution division of American University’s School of International Service. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Alliance for Peacebuilding and the African Studies Association. In 2014 he was Visiting Professor of Peace Studies and International Relations at the Martin Luther King Evangelical University of Nicaragua in Managua. He taught in Spanish a course in Christian Models of Peacebuilding to theology students and lectured to students in the faculties of law and psychology. Smith was U.S. Ambassador to Senegal 1996-99. In 1995-96 he was Special Presidential Envoy for Liberia, serving concurrently as Country Director for West African Affairs. He was U.S. Ambassador to Guinea 1990-93. From 1999 to 2003, he served as President of the National Peace Corps Association, the alumni group for former U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers. He and wife Judith served as Peace Corps Volunteers in Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia, 1963-65. Smith earned his A.B. from Harvard College and a PhD in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He also studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He and Judy have three children and seven grandchildren.