Drawing on 32 years of foreign service experience, former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand David Lambertson will be the Freeman Foundation Visiting Professor of Asian Affairs at CMC for the fall semester. The Freeman Foundation, founded by Houghton Freeman, provides funding for new initiatives in the study of Asian political economy. During his U.S. Foreign Service career, Lambertson earned several Presidential awards and the State Department's Meritorious, Superior, and Distinguished Honor Awards. While teaching political science as the Diplomat-in-Residence at the University of Kansas, he was appointed Ambassador to Thailand in 1991 by President George Bush. His responsibilities included all aspects of U.S. relations with Thailand at one of America's largest embassies, as well as oversight responsibility for U.S. government activities in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1991-1995.

He was a member of U.S. delegations to several international conferences, including the Paris Peace Talks, the 1998 United Nations conference on refugees in 1988 in Geneva, several conferences of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the 1989 Paris Conference on Cambodia, in which he led the U.S. contingent. In Washington, D.C., he took part in policy-making during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations; attended numerous crisis-management conferences in the White House; and testified before more than 35 appearances before Congressional committees. Lambertson also served in the following positions: deputy director of the Office of Japanese Affairs, director of the Office of Korean Affairs, and deputy assistant Secretary of State, responsible for Southeast Asia. Assignments also took him to Australia, England, France, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

Lambertson is a native of Fairview, Kan., said that he has always been interested in politics and international relations, beginning with extensive reading as a child. "My parents were well-read, and we always had a newspaper on the breakfast table," he said. "I was interested from an early age in international events, and I stayed interested throughout high school and college." Lambertson earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Redlands, and then decided to turn his lifelong interests into a career. He passed the U.S. Foreign Service exam as a senior in college and entered the service six months after graduation.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Thailand David Lambertson is the Freeman Foundation Visiting Professor of Asian Affairs for the fall semester.