Master of Arts in International Policy Studies

IPSS Assignment: U.S. Department of State – Washington D.C., January-April 2011; Mines Advisory Group – Bujumbura, Burundi, May-July 2011

Hailing from rural Massachusetts, Eli received his B.S. in International Relations from Seton Hall University in May 2008. Weeks later he boarded a plane for West Africa where he would spend the next 14 months teaching computers, sipping tea, eating camel, and staring into the expanses of the Sahara desert. When Mauritania’s Peace Corps program closed prematurely, Eli packed his bags once again and set sail for California.

As a graduate student at the Monterey Institute, Eli’s has focused his research on conflict and migration issues in French-speaking Africa. He spent the first half of his IPSS assignment at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration in Washington D.C. As a Program Officer for Central Africa, Eli helped formulate and coordinate U.S. refugee policy in the region, making important funding decisions for refugee assistance programs in Chad, C.A.R. and Cameroon. Eli spent the next three months in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, working with the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) in Burundi. During his time there, Eli wrote articles on MAG’s mine clearance operations and helped conduct a survey that assessed the presence of explosive remnants of war in central Burundi. As part of his IPSS research, Eli spent one week interviewing Congolese refugees in Northeastern Burundi. He also completed a marathon in Kigali, Rwanda! After finishing his graduate coursework this December, Eli hopes to begin a career as a civil servant working on security and development issues in Africa.