Conrad Turner is 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 in 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 the Kyrgyz Republic. He is a certified career coach.

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. As part of its “50 Alumni for 50 Years” initiative in 2024, American Councils for International Education recognized Conrad from among its 100,000 alumni for his commitment to transforming lives through public diplomacy.

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.