Mary-Lea Cox

Mary-Lea Cox is the Council's first-ever director of communications, a position she assumed in March 2007. This is her second stint with the SSRC. In the early to mid-1990s, she worked in the Council's Tokyo office as its first administrator of the Abe Fellowship Program. Cox received her doctorate in comparative government from the University of Essex in 1989, with an award-winning thesis on women, politics and Shakespeare. Her work in the communications field began when she was hired by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, as the center's first Web editor. She has since served as communications director for the New York-based Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and as editorial director in Columbia University’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Continuing her affiliation with Columbia, Cox is now an adjunct associate professor of international affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where she designs and teaches courses on online communications. Cox has written and edited several publications, including a Carnegie Council study guide on FDR’s “four freedoms” and a Pacific Institute study, “The Politics and Economics of the Internet and Cyberspace.”