Francis Mading Deng is a politician and diplomat from South Sudan who served as the newly independent country's first ambassador to the United Nations from 2012 to July 2016. Life and career Deng was educated at Khartoum University (Bachelor of Laws) and Master of Laws (LL.M.) and earned a Doctor of Juridical Science (J.S.D.) from Yale University. He also took graduate courses at King's College London. Under Sudanese presidents Ismail al-Azhari and Gaafar Nimeiry, Deng served as Human Rights Officer at the United Nations Secretariat (from 1967 to 1972) and subsequently as Ambassador of Sudan to the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. He also served as Sudan's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. After leaving his country's service, he was appointed as the first Rockefeller Brothers Fund Distinguished Fellow. From 1992 until 2004 Deng served as the United Nations' first Special Representative on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons. On 29 May 2007, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced the appointment of Deng as the new Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, a position he held until 17 July 2012 at the level of Under-Secretary General. From 2006 to 2007, Deng served as director of the Sudan Peace Support Project based at the United States Institute of Peace. He also was a Wilhelm Fellow at the Center for International Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research professor of international politics, law and society at Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Deng was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Deng served at the Woodrow Wilson International Center first as a guest scholar and then as a senior research associate, after which he joined the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow, where he founded and directed the Africa Project for 12 years. He was then appointed distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York before joining Johns Hopkins University. Among his numerous awards in his country and abroad, Deng is co-recipient with Roberta Cohen of the 2005 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for "Ideas Improving World Order" and the 2007 Merage Foundation American Dream Leadership Award. In 2000, Deng also received the Rome Prize for Peace and Humanitarian Action. From 2012 to July 2016, he served as South Sudan's