Craig Simons is a career Foreign Service Officer. He most recently served as the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Climate Coordinator and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Unit Chief. His overseas tours include coverage of environment and climate issues at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and political affairs at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, China. He also served in Havana, Cuba.

Before joining the Foreign Service, he worked as a journalist, including covering China for Newsweek and Singapore for Reuters and serving as Asia Bureau Chief for Cox Newspapers. Simons has been a fellow in the M.I.T. Knight Science Journalism program, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Public Policy, and in the Blakemore Freeman Program at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sichuan Province, China and wrote The Devouring Dragon: How China’s Rise Threatens Our Natural World, published by St. Martin’s Press. He earned an M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University and a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He is fluent in Mandarin and Spanish.