Ambassador Jimmy J. Kolker is an American diplomat, whose career became the embodiment of global health diplomacy—a field that he helped establish and define. He had a 30-year diplomatic career with the U.S. Department of State. A native of St. Louis, he graduated magna cum laude from Carleton in 1970 and received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1970-­71), which he spent in Chad, Uganda and Ghana. He subsequently earned a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School.

Kolker worked as a U.S. Senate staff member for four years prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1977. He held diplomatic reporting posts in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, before assuming jobs in management. He was Deputy Chief of Mission at the American embassies in Botswana from 1990 to 1994 and in Denmark from 1996 to 1999. In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated him as United States Ambassador to Burkina Faso. Kolker was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and served in this capacity until 2002, when President George W. Bush nominated him as United States Ambassador to Uganda. Again confirmed by the Senate, Kolker served in Uganda until 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he was Deputy Global AIDS Coordinator, leading implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Following that, he was Chief of the HIV/AIDS Section at UNICEF’s New York headquarters from 2007 to 2011, during which time he led UNICEF’s work on HIV and AIDS, focusing on mother-to-child-transmission of HIV, pediatric treatment, prevention among adolescents and young people, and protection for children and families affected by AIDS.

Kolker returned to government in 2011 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and in 2014 was named by President Obama as Assistant Secretary. He was the Department’s chief health diplomat, representing HHS at interagency and World Health Organization meetings. He played a leadership role in the United States’ response to the Ebola and Zika outbreaks and in promoting global health security. He was also an alternate board member of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

Kolker is a frequent panelist and guest lecturer on questions such as How can diplomacy and foreign policy advance public health goals (and vice versa)? He has been a guest speaker on health and science diplomacy at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, American University, Pomona, Cal Tech, the University of North Carolina, and the Uniformed Services Medical University, among others.

Retired since 2017, Kolker has remained active in promoting the issues on which he worked throughout his career: global health and science, diplomacy, and Africa.  This year he cotaught a graduate course on global health security at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. He serves on the boards of the AB InBev Foundation, Building Tomorrow, and the Firelight Foundation; and as a visiting scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is an adviser for several NGOs, including Last Mile Health, Catholic Relief Services’ Changing the Way We Care, and Texas Children’s Hospital Global HOPE pediatric cancer initiative. He also judges high school debate tournaments for Washington Urban Debate League.

It is with great pleasure that Carleton College confer on Jimmy Kolker the degree Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa.