Rob joined the National War College faculty in November 2025. Prior to this assignment, he served as the Director of the Office of Western European Affairs at the Department of State from 2023 to 2025, where he was responsible for developing and strengthening strategic engagements and bilateral ties with a dozen countries, including Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Vatican. Rob previously served as Director for the Office of European Union and Regional Affairs from 2021 to 2023, where he advanced U.S.-EU cooperation, particularly in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Rob contributed to the establishment of the Trade and Technology Council and the revitalization of the U.S.-EU China Dialogue.
From 2016 to 2018, he served as Director of the Office of Regional and Security Policy in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he contributed to the formulation and implementation of the United States’ first Indo-Pacific strategy. Prior assignments include Canberra, Guangzhou, Ankara, the NATO Desk, State’s Intelligence and Research Bureau, Shanghai, and Athens.
A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Rob holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard 's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Master of Science in National Resource Strategy from the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Maryland and was a State Department Thomas R. Pickering Fellow. Rob speaks fluent Mandarin and conversational Turkish, Greek, Korean, and Cantonese. He is married to Julia Fu and has two college-aged children.