Senior Advisor to the President for International and Global Chicago Affairs
J.D. Bindenagel is Senior Advisor to the President of DePaul University for International and Global Chicago Affairs, and serves as a member of the university's Global Task Force and as a DePaul representative on international matters in Chicago, continuing to make his nearly 30 years of American Diplomatic Corps experience available to DePaul University.
He is actively engaged in civic affairs and serves on several boards of civic, business, and non-profit organizations. He is a former U.S. Ambassador and veteran of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose career focused on American diplomacy with Germany, global business and education over more than 40 years. He served in the State Department, U.S. Consulates and Embassies in Germany during the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany, the European Monetary Union debates, American trade and investment issues, the Balkan Wars, debates on NATO security policy and membership, and on German national security.
Bindenagel is a leading American foreign policy expert on Germany and was the chief advocate for U.S. policy in Germany as the deputy and acting ambassador in Germany. He managed and led one of the largest U.S. Embassies in the world. He supported Foreign Direct Investment from the United States to Germany’s Eastern states through a series of innovative initiatives and investment conferences and was profiled as the acting U.S. Ambassador on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for leading a business friendly U.S. Embassy. He was a director of Rockwell International, 1991-1992. He is a seasoned international negotiator of business and political issues, including a settlement of $6 billion for claims arising from the Second World War, U.S.-German bi-lateral aviation and Status of Forces agreements and the Kimberley Process to stop Conflict Diamonds in the supply chain.
In Chicago, he is known as DePaul’s expert in government affairs. He managed DePaul University lobbyists, conceived a public policy program to obtain government funding and won $30 million for facilities and additional $33 million for the university’s Law School for rule of law, democracy and women’s rights programs in Iraq. In community relations, he worked to win city hall passage of a Planned Development Ordinance enabling DePaul to build two new classroom buildings, a new art museum, new music school and theatre school. He led the creation of the Chicago Higher Education Civic Engagement Roundtable to work with the city on key issues of workforce and economic development, research, culture and innovation/entrepreneurship.
He added to DePaul’s international outreach collaborating in China, Thailand, Taiwan, Bahrain, Jordan, Kenya, Germany and Mexico with faculty on programs/initiatives, notably overseas degree granting programs in business and computing/digital media and participated in negotiations to create a new executives program with the China Financial Futures Exchange Financial Markets Program in Chicago. He is the president of the Japan America Society of Chicago.
Bindenagel serves on boards of the Chicago Civic Federation, the International Visitors Center Chicago, the German-American Chamber of Commerce of the Midwest, the Grant Park Conservancy, DePaul’s International Human Rights and International Aviation Law Institutes, Bernadin Center for Theology and Ministry, Wilson Center Council, Arthur F. Burns Fellowships, the Humanitarian Aid Foundation, and is a member of the of the advisory board of the American Jewish Committee Berlin. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the President's Circle of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the American Council on Germany and the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies.
Bindenagel received the State Department's Distinguished Service Award (2001), the Commander's Cross of the Federal Order of Merit from the President of Germany (2001), and the Presidential Meritorious Service Award from President George W. Bush (2002).
He holds a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in public administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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