Dr. A Saj U Mendis is a career Foreign Service Officer of Class I (Ambassadorial rank) of the Sri Lanka Foreign Service. His first assignment in the Foreign Office was the Assistant Director of Economic Affairs and was posted to the Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in Geneva. Dr. Mendis was a member of number of Presidential & Prime Ministerial Delegations to several countries. He was also a senior member of Foreign Ministerial and other Ministerial delegations to over 60 meetings, parleys, negotiations, seminars, forums, conferences and summits and other bilateral visits to over 30 countries. Dr. Mendis has extensive experience and exposure in bilateral, trilateral, regional and multilateral diplomacy and negotiations.
In 2001, Dr. Mendis was appointed as the Official Spokesperson & Director of Communication of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was one of the key speechwriters to the then Ministers of Foreign Affairs from 2001 to 2010. He was the Counsellor of the High Commission of Sri Lanka to New Delhi for nearly five years. He was appointed as the Senior Director of Economic Affairs at the Ministry. Dr. Mendis was posted to the High Commission/Embassy of Sri Lanka to Singapore, as the Deputy Ambassador in 2008. He returned to Colombo in May 2010, on request of the Government, to assume the office of the Advisor to the Minister of Economic Development & Director General of the Ministry, which was the largest and most diverse Ministry, with focus on foreign investments & grants, infrastructure, rural development and tourism, amongst others. After completion of the tenure at the Ministry of Economic Development, Dr. Mendis was appointed as the Senior Director of the South Asia & SAARC Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was posted to the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Tokyo in December 2011 as the Deputy Chief of Mission/Deputy Ambassador till October 2015. In November 2015, Dr. Mendis was appointed as the Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the Kingdom of Bahrain. After the completion of tour of duty in Bahrain in September 2019, he was appointed as the Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the Republic of Korea. In September of 2021, Dr. Mendis was transferred to the Ministry and was the Additional Secretary of Economic Affairs, Public Diplomacy, Public Communication and Climate Change at the Ministry. In January of 2023, he was posted as the Ambassador to Vietnam and served till August of 2024, until he was transferred to the BIMSTEC Secretariat in Dhaka in September of 2024.
Before joining the Foreign Service, Dr. Mendis was a Senior Consultant on Privatization and Disinvestment at the Ministry of Finance of Sri Lanka, along with the World Bank. In the US, Dr. Mendis worked as an Associate Vice President on Institutional Investments at the Investment Bank, Lehman Brothers Inc. in New York and San Francisco for an extended length of time. He represented and negotiated on behalf of Lehman Brothers Inc. on Institutional Equity, Mergers & Acquisitions and Initial Public Offering/Conferences in the US, Europe and Asia.
Dr. Mendis is, currently, a Visiting Lecturer/Faculty/Professor/Examiner of PhD & MBA/MA programs in over 35 universities and academic institutions of repute in many parts of the world. Dr. Mendis has two publications i.e. “Bundesbank (Central Bank of Germany) Policies under different conditions of European Monetary System” and “Industrial and Entrepreneurial Development of Sri Lanka” (awaiting publication).
Dr. Mendis earned his B.A. Degrees in Business Administration, Economics & Communication from California State University, Fullerton and MBA in International Business and Negotiations from San Francisco State University/University of California. He completed his Postgraduate Specialization in Corporate & Strategic Negotiations at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and at Harvard Law School (HLS) & PhD on International Economics from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, known as IIT. Dr. Mendis is a regular Lecturer of the flagship program of Senior Executive Fellows (SEF) at Harvard & is a Senior [Executive] Fellow at Harvard.
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