Keith A. Eddins assumed his current duties as Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia, on August 2, 2008. His wife, Anne Bridgman, an editor and freelance writer, and their 10-year-old daughter Laurel, are with him in Bratislava. A career Foreign Service Officer, Keith’s first State Department assignment was at the American Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where he served as a vice consul and political officer. He then returned to Washington, where he was a watch officer in the Operations Center, a staff office in the Executive Secretariat, and a special assistant to then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Keith's subsequent career has focused primarily on European political and security issues. Abroad, he served as a political officer at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium, at the American Embassy in Moscow, Russia, and at the American Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic. In Washington, Keith worked on the State Department’s Russia Desk, in the European Bureau’s NATO affairs office, and as Senior Civil-Military Advisor to the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. Keith has also served on Board of Examiners of the Foreign Service and as Director of Political Training at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. Between his various assignments, Keith has earned a Master of Arts degree from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and he has spent a year each studying Slovak, Czech, and Russian. He has also taken French and Spanish. Over the course of his career, Keith has earned four individual Superior Honor Awards and two individual Meritorious Honor Awards; he has also figured in a number of group awards. Keith was also recognized as runner-up for the Director General's Award for Political Reporting for his coverage and analysis of Russian policy toward Bosnia and NATO, and he earned a Benjamin Franklin Award for pioneering a new method of evaluating the written essays of Foreign Service candidates. Born and raised in Gulfport, Mississippi, Keith attended the University of Virginia as an undergraduate, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980.