Tom Simons served as U.S. Ambassador to Poland and to Pakistan and as Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union. He is currently a Lecturer in Harvard University’s Government Department and Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, where he directed the Program on Eurasia in Transition from 2002 to 2005.  He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and has served as Chairperson of the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC.  He has written three books and some three dozen articles, book contributions and reviews on Central and East European history and culture, on Islam in history, and on U.S. policy on East-West relations and towards South Asia.

Simons was born September 4, 1938, in Crosby, Minnesota.  He holds a B.A. (magna cum laude) from Yale (1958) and an M.A. and Ph.D. (1959 and 1963) from Harvard, concentrating on West and Central European history.  Between 1963 and 1998, he was a Member of the U.S. Foreign Service.  He focused on East-West relations.  Assignments included: Consular and then Political Officer at Embassy Warsaw, 1968 1971; conventional arms reductions and European security issues in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs of the State Department, 1972-1974; Member of the Department's Policy Planning Staff, 1974-1975; Chief of the External Reporting Unit and Acting Political Counselor at Embassy Moscow, 1975-1977; and Deputy Chief of Mission at Embassy Bucharest, 1977-1979.

 In the 1980's, Simons achieved the record for tenure as Director of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, 1981-1985; was a Member of the Senior Seminar in Foreign Policy, 1985-1986; and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for relations with the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia, 1986-1989.  He was American Ambassador to Poland (1990-1993); Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union (1993-1995); and American Ambassador to Pakistan (1996- 1998).

Simons was an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relatio ns at the Hoover Institution (1971-1972) and Adjunct Professor of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1989-1990).  He has written some three dozen articles, book contributions, and reviews on Central and East European history and culture and U.S. policy on East-West relations and toward the Subcontinent, and three books. Two were published by St. Martin's Press: The End of the Cold War?, a brief history of East-West relations in the 1980's  (1990), and Eastern Europe in the Postwar World, a history of the area's  Communist period (1991, 2nd revised edition 1993).  The most recent, Islam in a Globalizing World (Stanford University Press, 2003), is based on the Payne Distinguished Lectures Simons gave at Stanford in 2002.  He is now working on a fourth, assessing developments in the post- Soviet space since the Soviet Union dissolved, and he will teach a course on Post-Communist Islam in Harvard’s Government Department in the spring of 2007.

Simons and his wife Peggy live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  They have two grown children and two remarkable grandchildren.