Profiles

Ian Mayo-Smith

An extract from the Bangkok Post Perspectives April 29, 2007

Ian Mayo-Smith was born in London in 1924.

   He was educated at Cambridge and served in the Intelligence Corps in World War II as a crypt analyst at Bletchley Park.

   He was in Nigeria as a civil servant during 1953-66 before returning to London in 1967 to do research under Prof Sir Austen Robinson at Cambridge. He subsequently worked for the Ford Foundation in Nigeria and Kenya, for the United Nations in East Africa, and for the University of Connecticut, where he became Director of the Institute of Public Service International.

   He represented the Harvard Institute for International Development in Brunei for two years (1988-90), and co-founded Kumarian Press with his wife Krishna Sondhi in 1977.

   Now a US citizen, Mr Ian Mayo-Smith spends half of each year in Pattaya and the rest in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

   He has three sons and 12 grandchildren.