World
Description of Work:
Since 2005, Melia has served as Deputy Executive Director of Freedom House.

In the recent March 2008 election in Zimbabwe in which Robert Mugabe of ZANU-PF ran against Morgan Tshvangirai of the MDC, Freedom House provided bicycles and radios to election observers to ensure that results were collected and recorded as quickly and fairly as possible.

Previously, he served as Director of Research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Foreign Service, at Georgetown University in Washington, DC where he still holds a teaching post in courses related to democracy.

Melia started his career as Legislative Assistant for foreign and defense policy to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and went on to the role of Associate Director of the Free Trade Union Institute of the AFL-CIO (1986 to 1988). For more than 12 years he worked with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), a non-governmental organization which promotes democracy worldwide as manager of programs in Central and Eastern Europe (1988 to 1993) and in the Middle East (1993 to 1996), as the Institutes's Vice President for Programs (1998-2001). He also directed programs in more than a dozen African countries.

Sources:
Congressional Hearing Testimony 14 June 2008
http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=92&staff=205

Photo: http://www.parliament.am/news.php?do=view&ID=1813&cat_id=2&day=02&month=05&year=2006〈=eng
Thomas Melia received his M.A. in Africa Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.