Conrad Turner is a Distinguished Visiting Professional with the Waide Center for Applied Ethics, Fairfield University, and Minister-Counselor of the Foreign Service of the United States of America, Retired. He taught public diplomacy from 2016-2018 at USC Annenberg’s Master of Public Diplomacy program as Visiting Senior Fellow and U.S. Public Diplomat-in-Residence. Prior to that, he headed the public affairs sections at the U.S. embassies in Ukraine and Iraq. As Deputy Director, Public Diplomacy in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, he controlled resources for PD programs in the Americas. He served as Senior Advisor to the Secretary’s Coronavirus Global Response Coordination Unit from 2020-21. Other Foreign Service assignments have taken him to Serbia, Croatia, Pakistan, India, Austria, Russia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. 

Conrad has attained fluency in Russian, Serbian/Croatian, French and Sierra Leone Krio. He is the recipient of five individual Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards, a Meritorious Step Increase and the ICASS Outstanding Leadership Award for interagency management. His entrée to PD was as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, where he worked with village rice farmers. Later, as Exhibit Guide with the U.S. Information Agency in the early days of glasnost, he debated current events and American society with hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens.

Conrad earned a master’s degree in Russian from Bryn Mawr College and is an alumnus of Haverford College.