As vice president of the International Program, Stephen J. Del Rosso is responsible for the strategy and focus of the program’s grantmaking in support of international peace and security and higher education, research, and peacebuilding in Africa. While overseeing the work across the program, he also has direct grantmaking responsibilities in several areas, including Asian Security, Bridging the Academic-Policy Gap, and Track II diplomacy with Iran and North Korea.
Prior to joining Carnegie, Del Rosso served as director of programs for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (now the Chicago Council on Global Affairs), one of the country’s largest and most active international affairs forums. Del Rosso’s previous foundation experience includes management of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ global security grantmaking program for almost six years and coordination of its final efforts in Eastern and Central Europe
A former career diplomat, Del Rosso served for a decade as a political officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, with overseas assignments in Central America and the Caribbean during the height of U.S. engagement in those regions in the mid-1980s. In Washington, he had tours in the Department of State's Operations Center and as a staff officer to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, during which he also participated in numerous missions across the globe. His other Foreign Service assignments included program coordinator of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, arms control legislative management officer, and director of the office of legislative operations. He was also a presidential management fellow in the international affairs division of NASA, a news producer at Voice of America, and a research assistant to a member of the British House of Commons.
Del Rosso holds a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, a master of arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he was an Earhart Fellow, a diploma in international studies from the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a BA in English from Tufts University.
He is chairman emeritus of the board of the Baltic-American Partnership Fund (an independent grantmaking foundation established by USAID and the Open Society Foundations) and a former member of the board of the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre and the advisory board of the Geneva Centre on Security Policy. He is also a member of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Advisory Committee, the Impact Funders Forum advisory board, the National Academy of Sciences Roundtable on Science Diplomacy, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Del Rosso is the author of and contributor to various international affairs and public policy publications and has taught courses on nationalism and international politics.
Del Rosso is married to Joy Miller Del Rosso, an international nutrition specialist, and has two adult daughters.
