Mauro De Lorenzo

Mauro De Lorenzo was a founding board member of Asylum Access and continues to serve as an advisor to the organization. He is Senior Research Scholar and Deputy Director of the Urbanization Project at the Stern School of Business, New York University. From 2009 to 2012, he was Vice President for Freedom and Free Enterprise at the John Templeton Foundation. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Resident Fellow in foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he led a project to re-imagine the place of foreign aid and development policy in U.S. foreign policy toward developing countries. He remains a Visiting Fellow at AEI.

Mr. De Lorenzo received a B.A. in Cognitive Science and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Delaware. He then earned a Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a research associate at both the American University in Cairo and the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, focusing on refugee policy and the dynamics of the wars in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In 2002, he was associate producer and head of research for ‘The Price of Aid,’ a BBC/ARTE documentary about U.S. food aid to Africa and the institutional misdiagnosis of famines. In 1996–97 he was assistant to the coordinator of refugee elections for Bosnia-Herzegovina at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). From 2007 to 2010, he served as the official ‘plus one’ and policy advisor to former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for his service on the Board of Directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an innovative multi-billion dollar U.S. foreign aid agency.