The Pickering Program staff are dedicated to serving the needs of Pickering Fellows and alumni. Meet our staff!
Lily Lopez-McGee – Director
Lily Lopez-McGee currently serves as the Director for the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs program. Previously, she served as the Deputy Director for the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program. Prior to her work at Howard University, Dr. Lopez-McGee served as manager at Diversity Abroad where she managed the Diversity Abroad Network, a professional network of institutions of higher education, and oversaw the development of the Access, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in International Education (AIDE) Roadmap, the first assessment tool developed to evaluate diversity and inclusion efforts in study abroad offices at U.S. institutions. Dr. Lopez-McGee also previously worked at UNCF Special Programs Corporation where she managed an internationally focused fellowship for undergraduate students and worked with minority serving institutions on capacity building efforts related to campus internationalization and grant management. Dr. Lopez-McGee serves as a Co-Chair of the Global Access Pipeline and has helped coordinate the Conference on Diversity in International Affairs sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she earned her bachelor’s in International Relations and master’s in Public Administration. She completed her doctoral work at George Mason University where she studied students’ perceived self-efficacy gains from study abroad. She is deeply committed to equalizing access to education and increasing opportunities for young people to gain international credentials. Dr. Lopez-McGee is bilingual in English and Spanish.