Jose Luis Mendez
RESUME

The main objective of his professional career has been to contribute --as practitioner, academic and consultant-- to the advancement of democratic governance in Mexico and Latin America. 
He studied --thanks to scholarships granted by El Colegio de Mexico and the National Council of Science and Technology-- a B.A in International Affairs at El Colegio de Mexico, in Mexico City (1977-1981, fifth place out of 26 students). After that he worked for some years in the Mexican government (Advisor to the General Director of the Institute for the Consumer Protection, 1981-1982; Advisor to the Undersecretary of Regional Development, 1983). In 1984, he went back to academia, first as a full time professor at Universidad Iberoamericana-Mexico City (1984-1987) and later on as a M.A. student and Fulbright Scholar (1987-1989), and Ph. D. student and Teaching Fellow (1989-1991) in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. There he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on public administration and policy at the subnational level in Mexico, Germany and the U.S., under the direction of B.Guy Peters. 
As by 1991 he was working in the U.S., the Mexican government offered him a “Mexican Scientists Return Grant” to come back to Mexico as a full-time research-professor at El Colegio de México (1991-1998), where soon after he became the coordinator of its Public Administration Program (1992-1997). During this time he focused on studying and promoting, as an academic and as a citizen, reforms related to democratic governance, mainly the introduction of a civil service law, laws promoting the development of the Third Sector in Mexico and better regulations to promote the small business sector. He also promoted the introduction in this country of policy analysis as a series of techniques based on more objective criteria. 
Since 1977 he has received various recognitions; he was named National Researcher level I and later level II, elected Secretary General and President of the Mexican Academy of Public Policy, elected as member of the International Board of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), elected as member of the Board of the Association of Professors and Researchers of Universidad Iberoamericana-Mexico City, and elected as the President of the Students Association of El Colegio de Mexico.
 He has also received 12 grants from various institutions to conduct research in various topics --University of Cornell grant for library research (1988), Thinker Foundation grant for field research in Peru (1989); University of Pittsburgh grant for field research in the U.S. (1990); Konrad Adenauer Foundation for field research in Germany, (1993); University of Texas at Austin grant for library research in the U.S. (1994); and, for field research in Mexico, grants by Universidad Iberoamericana (1990), El Colegio de Mexico (1992-1993), Hewlett Foundation (1992-1994), Ford Foundation (1996), Center for the Study of Western Hemisphere Commerce of the U.S. Congress (1996-1997), Center for Regional Integration Studies of the European Commission (1997), and National Council for Professional Studies (1998).
Additionally, he has been member of the Editorial Board of five international professional journals, member of the evaluating committees of the National Council of Science and Technology and member of the editorial board of the Fondo de Cultura Económica; he has given 40 conferences in the U.S., Latin America and Europe, thought 40 graduate or undergraduate courses, and published 54 academic chapters or articles --in English, Spanish or Portuguese— on topics such as the civil service, the Third Sector, small business, public policy, and governance and institutional reform in México and Latin America. He has been a consultant of the Federal Government (1996) and the Government of the Federal District (1998).
Due to the research and activism developed in the period 1991-1998, from 1998 to 2005 he was called to several governmental positions. First, to design and implement, as Executive Director of the Electoral Civil Service (1998-2001), a modern career civil service at the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), with the objective of assuring that the crucial 2000 presidential election were conducted in a professional and impartial manner. The results of such election showed the degree of success of that effort, as well as several independent analysis of the civil service system of the IFE (e.g. Blanca Heredia´s study by CIDE university as well as the report on such civil service by the Mexican Federal Accounting Office). 
Second, he was called to design, set up and be the first Chief of the Unit of Analysis of the Presidency of Mexico (2001-2003), where he developed hundreds of policy analysis for the President and was also in charge of coordinating the writing of all of his speeches. From that position he intensively promoted the introduction of a career civil service at the federal level in Mexico, something achieved in early 2003 when Congress approved a law to that effect for the first time in the history of Mexico. Given his role in the approval of the law, and his previous experience at IFE, he was sent by President Vicente Fox to design, set up and be the first Chief of the Unit of the Civil Service (2003-2004), within the new Ministry for Public Administration, and to develop there the statute for the law just introduced. Once that task was fulfilled, he went back for another year (2004-2005) as General Director of Studies and Analysis within the Office of the Presidency for Governmental Innovation, where he continued doing policy analysis and promoting several other reforms (as for instance a new law for the Third Sector in Mexico, which was approved by Congress in 2004).

In April 2005, he went back to his previous position of research-professor at El Colegio de Mexico. There he was one of the main promoters of a new Political Science Master Program, which started in August of 2007 and of which he is currently the Coordinator and professor of the course Decision-making and Public Policy.