Biden to nominate Gautam Rana as Slovakian ambassador
PRESIDENT Joe Biden is set to nominate Indian-American career diplomat Gautam Rana as the new US Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Slovakia.
In a statement on Wednesday (25), the White House announced the president’s intent to send Rana’s nomination for further ratification.
A career member of the Senior
Foreign Service, US - with rank of Counselor, Rana is currently
Deputy Chief of Mission of the US
Embassy in Algeria and was the Charg d’Affaires ad interim there from August 2020 to February 2022.
Earlier, Rana served as the Deputy Chief of Mission and Charg d’Affaires ad interim at the US Embassy in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Among other positions, Rana was Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff and the Deputy Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the US Embassy in New Delhi.
Rana also served as the Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and worked in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the UAE, the White House release read.
Prior to joining the Foreign Service in 2002, Rana was a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society in New York City, and a civil rights fellow with the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.
Rana has varying levels of proficiency in Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish, and Arabic. He has degrees in Economics and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, a law degree from Vanderbilt University, and a Master of Arts in Strategic Security Studies from the National Defense University. Rana is married, with two children.
In March, Biden nominated diplomat Puneet Talwar as the country’s ambassador to Morocco and political activist Shefali Razdan Duggal as his envoy to the Netherlands.
Earlier this month, a powerful Republican Senator has lifted the “hold” on the Senate confirmation of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who has been nominated by Biden as the country’s next ambassador to India.