Deborah Lehr serves as the Chairman of the Antiquities Coalition. She is also the founding Chairman of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at The George Washington University. In that capacity, she launched the International Coalition to raise the profile of the looting of antiquities in Egypt, resulting in a private-public partnership with the Egyptian government.
In addition, currently, Lehr is the Vice Chairman of the Paulson Institute, a think tank founded by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson located at the University of Chicago. Lehr has managed a successful consulting business representing Western and Chinese companies such as Sesame Workshop, Tory Burch, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Pfizer, Sony Music, Time Warner and Boeing. Previously, she served as Senior Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, and was a Senior Managing Director at the New York Stock Exchange focused on emerging markets. Lehr was President of Stonebridge China, with offices in Beijing and Shanghai. Prior to joining Stonebridge, Lehr was a partner at Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, a global top-10 law firm, where she helped build a successful trade business. Lehr also served in the US Government where she was a lead negotiator for China’s WTO Accession at the US Trade Representative, a Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, and involved in export control and trade policy issues at the Department of Commerce.
Lehr has studied archaeology at George Washington University, and participated in several excavations.
Lehr serves as a member of the International Council of Advisors for National Geographic, on the Board of the Archaeological Institute of America, on the International Advisory Board of the London School of Economics, the Advisory Council of the Elliott School at George Washington University, and the Board of the 100,000 Strong Program for China and is a board member of DC Cap, a program to support DC public high school students.
