Senior Fellow
Thant Myint-U is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge and the author of five award-winning books on history and politics, including most recently, Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World. He is also a senior adviser to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank and a Senior Fellow of the United Nations Foundation.
From 2009-2021, he led reform efforts in Myanmar, as a mediator, an adviser to the President, the chair of the Yangon Heritage Trust, and the chair of U Thant House.
Educated at Harvard and the University of Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1996, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine in 2013 as one of the year’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers” and in 2014 by Prospect magazine as one of the world’s top 50 thinkers. He is also a recipient of the Fukuoka Grand Prize from the Government of Japan (2015) and the Padma Shri, from the Government or India (2018).
Thant Myint-U has also served for more than a decade with the United Nations, on three peacekeeping missions, in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, as head of the policy planning in the Department of Political Affairs, in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, and as a Special Adviser on Humanitarian Diplomacy.
