Sarah E. Mendelson

Sarah MendelsonAmbassador Sarah E. Mendelson has served at Carnegie Mellon University since 2018. 

Beginning in September 2024, she is Director, Sustainable Futures. 

From January 2018-August 2024, she was Head of CMU's Heinz College in Washington, DC and Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy.

Contact: smendelson@cmu.edu

At CMU, she co-chairs the University’s Sustainability Initiative and is a faculty affiliate of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow with the Center for Sustainable Development in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution, a co-chair of SDSN USA, and a board member of the Free Russia Foundation. In fall 2026, she was listed among “The New Abolitionists” in recognition of the work she has done over several decades combating human trafficking.

Her current work focuses on local and global challenges including socioeconomic needs and demographic disparities using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework. She collaborates with colleagues to leverage AI to close data gaps and data lags. CMU’s Sustainable Futures plans to collaborate with global partners and local communities to design people-centered data systems that reveal pressing local needs, and where possible, identify local solutions as well as recommend policies that drive tangible social impact. The work is meant to elevate new models of global development to help democracies deliver and inspire new approaches to solving critical socioeconomic needs.

Drawing on previous research and strategic convenings, the work on Sustainable Future includes the establishment of a Community of Practice (CoP) populated by senior rights experts and data scientists from inside and outside CMU who are driving a paradigm shift in how we teach, train, research, and work on human rights using the SDGs.

From 2015-2017, Ambassador Mendelson served as the US Representative to the UN’s ECOSOC and as an alternate delegate from the United States to the UN’s General Assembly. She led on international development, human rights, humanitarian affairs, and combating human trafficking. There she oversaw campaigns to get country-specific resolutions passed in the General Assembly and to get NGOs, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, accredited to the UN.

Prior to her appointment as Ambassador, she served as a Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID from 2010-2014 where she was the Agency lead on democracy, human rights, and governance. A long time policy entrepreneur, she has spent over 30 years working on development and human rights as a scholar and practitioner including in Moscow with the National Democratic Institute, on the faculty of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and over a decade as senior adviser and inaugural director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There she also worked as a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program where she over saw focus groups, public opinion surveys, and social marketing campaigns in Russia on a range of issues.

The author of over 100 scholarly and public policy publications, Ambassador Mendelson received her BA in history from Yale University and her PhD in political science from Columbia University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Research Areas

Mendelson is the editor of the recently released Higher Education and SDG 16. This book is about rethinking how we advance human rights using the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. And specifically, the ways in which issues such as poverty, or food insecurity or maternal mortality are never about one thing only. They are interconnected. The SDGs represent a 21st century way of understanding the range of rights encompassed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rights cannot be separated from development, and development cannot be siloed from peace. This development framework elevates the importance of socioeconomic rights. The SDG principle to “leave no one behind” thus emerges as an important aspect of human rights. The SDGs were presciently built to address the challenges that have emerged as urgent in many communities—from inequality to the climate crisis, from pandemics to declines in life expectancy, from an increase in violence and conflict to the enabling of corruption. It is a framework that recognizes development happens everywhere—not just in the “global south” or in so-called “developing” countries. This book details multiple pathways out of the current doom and gloom and helps advance the closely aligned and timely endeavors of creating peaceful, just, and inclusive communities. The book touches on numerous SDGs including SDG 16 (access to justice and combating corruption); SDG 2 (addressing food insecurity); SDG 3 (health and wellbeing); SDG 4 (educating the next generation about the SDGs); SDG 5 (gender); SDG 10 (reducing inequalities); SDG 11 (sustainable cities); and SDG 17 (university partnership to advance the SDGs).

 

Recent Publications

 

On Russia and Ukraine:

 

Additional Information

Education

  • Columbia University, Ph.D., Department of Political Science
  • Columbia University, Harriman Institute Certificate
  • Yale University, B.A., History

 

Community Service

 

Speaking Engagements and Convenings

Media Mentions