Ambassador Gene B. Christy is the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Commander, U.S. Pacific Command in Honolulu, Hawaii. Previously, he served as State Department Advisor to the President of the U.S. Naval War College and as a professor in the National Security Decision Making department faculty. Ambassador Christy served as the United States Ambassador to the Southeast Asian nation of Brunei Darussalam from 2002 to 2005. In his 36-year career with the Department of State, Ambassador Christy served in Indonesia twice (both the U.S. Consulate in Surabaya and the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta), in Turkey two times (both at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara), and at the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ambassador and Mrs. Christy were pioneers in establishing the U.S. Embassy in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan after the fall of the Soviet Union (1992-94), and the ambassador served as political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, both before and during the period of the U.S.-led intervention (1994-96). The ambassador has also served on several occasions in the State Department in Washington, D.C. He was Director for Asia at the National Security Council 2000-01. Ambassador Christy’s State Department specialization is political affairs. A member of the Senior Foreign Service, he has the rank of Minister Counselor. He speaks Turkish and Indonesian and has some fluency in French, Malay, and Turkmen. Ambassador Christy is a graduate of Rice University in Houston, Texas. He attended the University of Texas Law School and spent a year at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program under State Department sponsorship 1980-81. Ambassador Christy is married to Rebecca Stanford Christy.