Goli Ameri

Goli Ameri (born September 26, 1956) is an Iranian-American businesswoman and former U.S. diplomat.

She is the co-founder of StartItUp, a mobile technology platform that provides resources to aspiring entrepreneurs.

She formerly served as Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Values and Diplomacy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.

She came to the United States as a student in 1974 to attend Stanford University.

There, she earned a B.A. in Communications and French Literature and, later, her M.A. in Communications.

She also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.

The contest received national attention when, late in the campaign, Wu admitted that he had been disciplined for attempted sexual assault of a female classmate while he was a student at Stanford in 1976.

Ameri did not focus on the issue initially, but heavily pushed it in the closing days of her campaign.

Wu won the election with 58 percent of the vote; Ameri received 38 percent, and Dean Wolf, the Constitution Party candidate, received 4 percent.

She became a U.S. citizen in 1989.

Ameri was founder and president of eTinium, Inc., a telecommunications consulting firm in Portland, Oregon.

She is the author of over fifty market studies and wrote a bi-monthly industry analysis column for Telephony magazine.

She has been quoted in such publications as The National Business Journals, The Oregonian, The Seattle Times, The San Jose Mercury News, and Internet Week and has been invited as a speaker and moderator to industry conferences worldwide.

Prior to founding eTinium, Ameri was a director at U.S. Leasing, a former division of Ford Credit and Fleet Bank, in San Francisco.

She served on the steering committee of the Babson in Oregon M.B.A. program, and was a member of the Oregon Steering Committee on the Campaign for Undergraduate Education for Stanford University.

She was a trustee and the Vice Chair for Development for the Catlin Gabel School, overseeing fundraising activities for the scholarship fund and teacher education.

Ameri has also taught Junior Achievement classes in Oregon.

She is fluent in English, French and Persian, as well as conversant in Spanish.

Ameri ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican in 2004, and is a former U.S. Representative to the United Nations.

She serves on the board of trustees of Freedom House, as well as on the Center for Middle East Public Policy advisory board of the RAND Corporation, a group of public and private sector leaders that provide guidance and support for RAND's Middle East research.

Ameri was born in Tehran, Iran.

In 2004, Ameri handily defeated moderate small businessman Tim Phillips and conservative software executive Jason Meshell to become the Oregon Republican Party's nominee for Oregon's 1st congressional district, in a challenge to three-term incumbent Democrat David Wu.

Ameri's campaign gained a great deal of attention from political insiders in Washington, D.C. because of her fast-paced fundraising skills.

She was dubbed one of the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Super Six" candidates.

In 2004, Ameri was appointed by George W. Bush as one of three public members of the United States' delegation to the 61st session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which meets annually in Geneva, Switzerland.

In the summer of 2005, President Bush appointed Ameri as the head of the United States' delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, which is headquartered in New York City.

There, she worked on UN Management Reform, the creation of the UN Human Rights Council and, due to her background in the field of high-technology, on the Internet Governance Portfolio.

She was sworn in by then-U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton in September 2005 and served until the end of the session in December.

She was confirmed retroactively by the United States Senate for this position on May 26, 2006.

Ameri has also spoken at events on Middle East issues, democracy promotion and UN reform nationwide, including a testimony before the United States Helsinki Commission's Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing, "The Iran Crisis: A Transatlantic Response," as well as at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, the World Affairs Council of Oregon, and the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In October 2007, Ameri was named as one of the "100 Most Powerful Women in the Northwest" by The NW Women's Journal for her UN service and her position on the Advisory Board of the National Education for Women's Leadership program at the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University.

In cooperation with the World Affairs Council of Oregon, Ameri organized and hosted a visit by eight East Asian United Nations Ambassadors as part of a public diplomacy trip to Portland in the spring of 2007.

On November 15, 2007, Ameri was nominated by President Bush to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, succeeding Dina Habib Powell and presiding over the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The Bureau is largely responsible for the United States government's public diplomacy efforts abroad.

Ameri received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor on May 11, 2008.

The award is given annually to 100 recipients to pay tribute to the experiences and individual achievements of immigrants to the United States.

After a series of Senate hearings in January and February 2008, she was confirmed by the Senate for the position on March 13, 2008.

In 2012, the Carnegie Corporation of New York included Ameri in its annual list of "Immigrants: The Pride of America," which was published on July 4, 2012 in The New York Times.

She also appeared in the 2012 PBS documentary "The Iranian Americans," which chronicles the history of Iranian immigrants to the United States after the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Ameri has periodically written op-eds about Iran, including in The Wall Street Journal and The Hill.