Public Diplomacy Council of America Announces 2025 Awards

The Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA) announces the two winners of its annual award for excellence in public diplomacy. The winners are:
  PDCA President Joel Anthony Fischman praised the two award recipients for their innovation and creativity in furthering the practice of U.S. public diplomacy. “Both sets of recipients demonstrate the creative use of diplomacy in advancing U.S. interests and model the opportunities available to other public diplomacy practitioners in the State Department. We are pleased to recognize them and thank them on behalf of our members for their efforts.”
 
PDCA promotes excellence and honors achievement in professional practice, academic study, and advocacy for public diplomacy. Its 400 members include U.S. diplomats, scholars, rising professionals, and retired Foreign Service and Civil Service officials interested in the public dimension of U.S. statecraft and those involved in educational and cultural exchange.
 
The awards program dates to 1993. More information on the program and past recipients is available here. A Zoom program recognizing the recipients of the 2025 awards will take place this summer.
 
Northstar Team
 
The Northstar team has significantly advanced the State Department's public diplomacy goals by harnessing cutting-edge AI technology to enhance media monitoring capabilities, drive time- and cost-saving efficiencies, and improve situational awareness.
 
The Northstar application does so by enabling the Department to efficiently track real-time news as it occurs, a critical function for ensuring timely and responsive media engagement. It achieves this by providing AI translation of more than 500,000 news articles and social media posts per day, AI-generated media summaries and data visualizations about Department social media trends, and tailored analytics dashboards for real-time insights on topics, countries, and regions.
 
Indicative of the application’s usefulness, former Under Secretary Liz Allen estimated that Northstar, designed to streamline labor and overlapping contracts throughout the Department, has saved 180,000 annual labor hours and freed up significant amounts of contract dollars.
 
U.S.-Saudi Higher Education Partnerships Forum
 
Education is a fundamental pillar of the U.S.-Saudi partnership, underpinning bilateral political and economic relations and providing critical financial support to U.S. colleges and universities via the Saudi government’s large foreign scholarship program. However, the Saudi Ministry of Education’s restructuring of that program has steadily reduced the number of Saudi students at U.S. universities over the past 10 years.
 
To ensure that the United States remains Saudi Arabia’s educational partner of choice, Embassy Riyadh’s cultural affairs office and representatives from the Institute of International Education collaborated on a strategy of sustained strategic engagement with senior Saudi Ministry of Education officials as well as U.S. and Saudi universities. The effort culminated in the first-ever U.S.-Saudi Higher Education Partnership Forum that brought together U.S. university officials with Saudi government officials and educators for three days of site visits, roundtables, and partnership development.
 
Among its accomplishments, the Forum has led to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) outlining both countries’ commitment to strengthening higher education and scientific collaboration. The MOU has led to the creation of the first-ever Fulbright program in Saudi Arabia for U.S. graduate students.  In addition, Saudi Arabia has committed to increase the number of Saudi students in the United States by 2,000 a year over the next five years, which will provide U.S. universities an additional 160 million dollars of annual revenue.       
 
For more information:
Contact the co-chairs of the PDCA Awards Committee:
Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne
Ambassador Cynthia Grissom Efird
Awards@publicdiplomacy.org