The Ambassador is a career Foreign Service Officer who has spent most of his nearly 30 years with the Department of State engaged in the practice of public diplomacy. During the 2006-07 academic year, Mr. Seche was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southern California, where he taught in the recently established master's degree program in public diplomacy.

From February 2005-August 2006, Mr. Seche served as Charge d'Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria, following the departure of the Ambassador in the wake of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri; he was Deputy of Chief of Mission for the six months prior. This was Mr. Seche’s second tour in Damascus: from 1999-2002, he was Counselor for Public Affairs and Director of the American Cultural Center. He spent the two years between his Damascus assignments as Director of the Office for Egypt and Levant Affairs at the Department of State in Washington, DC.

Mr. Seche entered the Foreign Service in 1978 and spent the first seven years of his career in public diplomacy positions in Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia. Other overseas assignments have included four years (1989-1993) as Information Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and four years (1993-1997) as Press Attache at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. Following his service in India, he returned to Washington for the first of two years of Arabic language training, completing the program at the Foreign Service Institute's Field School in Tunis.

Mr. Seche received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and spent four years as a journalist before entering the Foreign Service.