Email: tkhuffaker@gmail.com
Tom Huffaker is a retired US State Department official and former energy sector executive. As an American diplomat, he served in Yugoslavia, India, and twice in both Russia and Canada for over twenty-four years. Tom’s later postings as deputy economic minister in Moscow and U.S. Consul General in Calgary focused on energy policy, the environment, and broader economic relations.
Following his retirement from the State Department in 2009, Tom spent ten years in the energy sector, primarily in Calgary, Canada. He first worked as VP for Policy and Environment at the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and then as VP for External Relations at Imperial Oil Limited.
Long active in the non-profit sector, Tom has served on the boards of the Anglo-American School of Moscow, the Oslo-based Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, The Canada Center of the Woodrow Wilson Institute, the Canadian American Business Council, the Canada West Foundation, and the Alberta Chapter of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, among others. At Imperial, he was dual-hatted as president of the Imperial Foundation and stewarded $15,000,000 in yearly corporate contributions, mainly to the non-profit sector.
Tom is a member of the State Bar of California and the American Foreign Service Association. His undergraduate degree is from the University of California, Davis, and his law degree is from the University of California, San Francisco. He has an economics diploma from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute.
Tom and his wife Claire, also a former U.S. diplomat, have lived in Durango for several years and, like most, revel in the extraordinary outdoor life on offer. He is an avid hiker, backpacker, and peak bagger, and a devoted, if amateurish, skier, fly fisher, and rafter/kayaker. Tom and Claire have two grown children, a daughter in Palo Alto and a son in Boston.