President Joe Biden announced his intention to nominate Kathleen A. FitzGibbon as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Niger. On August 3, 2022, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee received the nomination.
Elizabeth Rood, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister-Counselor, is currently the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia. Before that, she served as a Faculty Advisor at the U.S. Army War College.
Previously, she served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, much of that time as Chargé d’Affaires, ad interim. Before that, she was Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Earlier, Rood directed the State Department’s Office of Export Control Cooperation in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, the Office of Caucasus Affairs and Regional Conflicts in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, and the Foreign Service Institute’s Stability Operations Division. Additionally, she served as Principal Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Peshawar, Pakistan. In earlier assignments, she served as the State Department’s representative on the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team in Paktika Province in southeastern Afghanistan and Deputy to the U.S. Special Negotiator for the Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria conflicts. Previous assignments include the Nonproliferation Bureau; the U.S. Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna, Austria; the U.S. Consulate General in Duesseldorf, Germany; and U.S. Embassies in Vienna, Austria, and Moscow, Russia. Rood is the recipient of numerous State Department performance awards, including three Senior Foreign Service Performance Awards.
A native of North Carolina, she holds an M.A. from the University of Maryland and an A.B. from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She speaks French, Russian, German, Pashto, Dari, and Georgian.
