Prime Minister Kevin Rudd
The Sharon and John Loeb Lecture
Kevin Rudd is Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America, taking up his post in Washington DC in March 2023. Ambassador Rudd served as Australia’s twenty-sixth Prime Minister, from 2007 to 2010, then as Minister for Foreign Affairs before a second term as Prime Minister in 2013. He was Member for Griffith in the Australian Parliament from 1998 to 2013.
Since leaving government, Ambassador Rudd has resided in the United States where he is recognized as a leading analyst of China. In 2015, he became inaugural President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. In 2020, he was appointed President and CEO of the Asia Society globally, and in 2022 he founded the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. In 2019, Ambassador Rudd was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for eminent service to Indigenous reconciliation, innovative economic initiatives, and major policy reform. Ambassador Rudd holds many honorary positions: for example, at the Atlantic Council and Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, at the Paulson Institute in Chicago, at Sciences Po’s Paris School of International Affairs, and at the Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation in Hamburg. He is founder and co-chair of an Australian charity, the National Apology Foundation, and a trustee of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.
The Sharon and John Loeb Lecture
Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., a graduate of Harvard College and the Business School and a former investment banker at Loeb, Rhoades & Co., founded by his father and grandfather, was appointed by President Reagan as U.S. Ambassador to Denmark. Later, he served as a delegate to the U.N. General Assembly; having also received a C.B.E from the Queen of England and the Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog from the Queen of Denmark, Amb. Loeb has long exemplified a commitment to public service and philanthropy. Sharon H. Loeb, a graduate of Columbia School of Law, fluent in French, Spanish and Italian, was an international attorney/business advisor. As a philanthropist she established the Endowment for Integrative Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the name of her family, one of the founders of the medical school. She is an avid supporter of the Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy at GWU. Amb. and Mrs. Loeb are also lovers of the arts. He has the largest private collection of Danish art in the world.