Patricia McMahon Hawkins

Patricia McMahon Hawkins (born 1949) is a United States career foreign service officer and member of the U.S. State Department. She was the United States Ambassador to Togo from 2008 to 2011.

Patricia was born in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of East Stroudsburg University with a bachelor degree in education. She has also studied French at Georgetown University, the University of Dijon, and New York University.

She is married to Richard S.D. Hawkins, formerly a director of quality improvement for the Otis Elevator Company who quit his job and applied to join the Foreign Service to spend more time with his wife, and has two children, Frédéric and Jessica. Her home in the United States is in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire.

Her career started in the United States International Communications Agency in 1980. At USIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., she was the Country Affairs Officer for the eight countries of Francophone West Africa, and Policy Application and Coordination Officer (PACO) in the office of USIA's Assistant Director. She also served as the Public Affairs Advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the CSCE Conference on the Human Dimension, in Paris in 1989. Her first tour was in Paris, where she served as the Assistant Information Officer and Deputy Press Attaché. She subsequently served as Information Officer in Kinshasa, Zaire, as Public Affairs Officer in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as Cultural Affairs Officer in Bogotá, Colombia, as Counselor for Public Affairs in Abidjan, Cộte d'Ivoire, where she also served briefly as Acting DCM and then for several months as Chargé d'affaires. In 2001, she was posted to the Dominican Republic, as Counselor for Public Affairs. Her most recent assignments have been in Washington, D.C., as Policy Application and Coordination Officer in the Office of Public Affairs of the Bureau of African Affairs, and as a Career Development Officer in the Bureau of Human Resources. During a three-year hiatus from the Foreign Service, Pat served as the Executive Assistant to the President and CEO of Otis Elevator Company, in Farmington, Connecticut.

She succeeded David B. Dunn as the US Ambassador to Togo on August 22, 2008. She arrived at post on September 10, 2008 and presented her credentials to the Togolese President on September 12, 2008.

 This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Department of State website http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/index.htm (Background Notes).