Mitchell, Derek James, 1964-

Derek James Mitchell (born September 16, 1964) is an American diplomat with extensive experience in Asia policy. He was appointed by President Barack Obama as the first special representative and policy coordinator for Burma with rank of ambassador, and was sworn in by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on October 2, 2011. On June 29, 2012, the U.S. Senate confirmed him as the new United States Ambassador to Burma. On September 4, 2018, Mitchell succeeded Kenneth Wollack as president of the National Democratic Institute.

Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Charlotte (née Mendelsohn) and Malcolm S. Mitchell, M.D., an academic medical oncologist and tumor immunologist, while his father was serving in the U.S. Public Health Service. His parents later settled in Orange, Connecticut, a suburb of New Haven, where he attended elementary, middle and high school. Mitchell graduated with a B.A. in foreign affairs, with a concentration in Soviet studies, from the University of Virginia in 1986. He attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, from 1989–1991, where he studied United States and East Asian diplomatic history and public international law, and was awarded a foreign language and area studies fellowship for the 1990-91 school year. He received a Master of Arts degree in law and diplomacy in 1991, earning a certificate for proficiency in Mandarin Chinese. From December 1988 to June 1989, he had worked as copy editor at The China Post, Taipei, Taiwan, at the time the largest English-language daily newspaper on Taiwan, where he first learned Mandarin Chinese and further studied the language at Nanjing University, China, in the summer of 1990.

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