Stephen P. O’Dowd, Waterville Central School Class of 1977, will be the guest speaker at this week’s WCS celebration of its 150th year.
O’Dowd recently completed over 42 years of distinguished U.S. government service, first as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco and culminating as a member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Counselor at the U.S. Department of State.
Just before his retirement, O’Dowd served in the Department of State’s Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) in support of the Enduring Welcome initiative facilitating the travel and processing of former Afghan employees of the U.S. government from Afghanistan to the United States for resettlement.
Prior to that he had returned to Morocco for three years as Acting Deputy Chief of Mission and Economic Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Rabat.
O’Dowd also was PRM’s Senior Coordinator for Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.
O’Dowd also held multiple overseas and domestic positions focusing on economic and commercial issues, including Director of the Office of Economic and Development Affairs in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs and Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.
O’Dowd first joined the State Department as a Civil Servant after serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco.
He holds a B.A. (cum laude) from Hamilton College in Clinton and a M.S. in National Resource Strategy from the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School in Washington, DC.
O’Dowd and his wife, Rhonda Brown, are the parents of four adult children.
He is the son of the late William (Bill) and Margaret (Peg) O’Dowd, both of whom graduated from WCS.