People

MUCH ADDO. Mina Addo, most recently a legislative assistant for health care with Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has joined Burness Communications in Bethesda, Md., as a senior associate for public policy. Addo will engage a similar slate of issues, but this time from the opposite direction. "When you're on the Hill, you're really in the thick of things," Addo says. "You have much faster access to information. It just feels [like] you're in the middle of where things happen. We still, obviously, engage with policymakers, but it's a little bit different -- you're coming from the outside." A native Washingtonian, Addo was transplanted into a frosty clime when her father got a job in Bismarck, N.D. "It was definitely much colder than anything I had experienced," she says, "but you know, you just kind of get used to it after a while." After receiving her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 2000, Addo became a legislative correspondent in Dorgan's office, where she had interned in college. She then spent five years with the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and two more as a research associate with Russell Reynolds Associates, Inc., before returning to Dorgan's office in 2008.

BERMAN'S BAND. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman has appointed three new professional staff members to the panel's majority staff. Thomas Omestad, who will handle special projects and investigations, was the diplomatic correspondent for U.S. News & World Report from 1997 to 2009 and more recently was a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, part of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. A 1982 graduate of the University of Minnesota, Omestad has reported from more than 50 countries for U.S. News, and has worked for the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Foreign Policy. Sajit Gandhi, the committee's new South Asia expert, worked at the National Security Archive before joining the State Department in 2004 as a presidential management fellow. From 2007-08, he was a consultant with The Cohen Group. He has a bachelor's degree from George Washington University and a master's in security studies from Georgetown University. Katherine Brown, taking charge of public diplomacy programs for the panel, is a doctoral candidate in communications at Columbia University. A George Washington University graduate, Brown served as a communications adviser to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2003-04. She then spent three years as communications manager for The Asia Foundation, an NGO with offices throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

This article appears in the Sep. 18, 2010, edition of National Journal Daily.

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