Mr. Vangala Ram is an intelligence and Foreign Service professional. He retired from the U.S. Foreign Service as a Senior FSO recently after a distinguished twenty-seven year career, earning a number of awards along the way. Mr. Ram’s tours in the Foreign Service included nine overseas diplomatic assignments in Banjul, Amman, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tunis, Riyadh, Seoul, Cologne, Kabul, and Herat. Some of his key positions included Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM), Senior Civilian Representative (SCR), and Office Director for Regional Security and Arms Transfers in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs (PM/RSAT).

Mr. Ram served as the Department of State Chair at the National Intelligence University (NIU) and later taught graduate school there for several years. Mr. Ram has served as a Senior Analyst (de facto DNIO), at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), and as a Cyber Subject Matter Expert (SME) at USCYBERCOM.

Mr. Ram is a native New Yorker, born in Queens, New York City. However, as the child of diplomats he spent his youth in Beirut from the age of four to fourteen. Following graduation from college, Mr. Ram went to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and served as a Military Intelligence (MI) officer in the U.S. Army, and is a combat veteran of Desert Storm.

Mr. Ram served in five of the six regional bureaus in the U.S. Department of State. Highlights of Mr. Ram’s nine diplomatic assignments include assignments as Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) in West Africa and Senior Civilian Representative (SCR) in Afghanistan. Mr. Ram has been recognized several times individually with the Superior Honor Award (SHA) and is a graduate of Senior Training at the National Defense University (NDU), Eisenhower School where he was a Distinguished Graduate (DG). Mr. Ram’s foreign languages include Arabic, Russian, Persian-Farsi and German. He is married to a fellow Foreign Service Officer (FSO) in the Consular cone.