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Name: Spratlen, Pamela
Current Position: Previous Ambassador
Pamela L. Spratlen was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic on April 15, 2011.
She was born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in Washington State and California. Her father, Thaddeus Spratlen, was a professor in the Department of Marketing at the University of Washington’s School of Business. Her mother, Lois Price Spratlen, was an associate professor in the University of Washington’s School of Nursing, the university’s ombudsman and the author of African American Registered Nurses in Seattle: The Struggle for Opportunity and Success.
Spratlen earned an A.B. in Psychology from Wellesley College in 1976. After graduation, she relocated to California to work for Los Angeles-based Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and other public service organizations.
In 1981 she received her M.A. from the School of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley, and attended the U.S. Army War College.
From 1981 to 1989, Spratlen served as Senior Consultant to the California Legislature’s Joint Legislative Budget and Assembly Ways and Means Committees, advising them on oversight of the state’s $3 billion higher education budget.
In 1990, Spratlen joined the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., as an economic officer. By 1998, she had advanced to Executive Secretariat and Special Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State, working as a member of the team responsible for planning the official travels of Secretary Madeleine Albright. In that capacity, Spratlen went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in January 1999 to help lay the groundwork for Albright’s meetings with the Russian Federation on the subject of the Kosovo situation.
Spratlen went on the serve as Country Director in the Bureau of European Affairs and as Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs. She held U.S. diplomatic posts in Guatemala and, from 2000 to 2002, in Moscow. She then became Vladivostok Consul General, a position she held from 2002 to 2004. The following year she was named Diplomat-in-Residence at Hawaii’s East West Center.
Spratlen also served at the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most recently she was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Astana, Kazakhstan.
She speaks Russian, French and Spanish.