Rebecca Mowbray joined BGR in January 2022 as the group’s President, CEO and Samuel
Zemurray Chair in Research Leadership. Mowbray came to BGR with a breadth of experience in
the public policy field from a career focused on governmental reform, accountability and
transparency. She worked as a journalist for 18 years for the Times-Picayune, Houston Chronicle
and other publications. After leaving journalism she spent nearly eight years in the City of New
Orleans Office of Inspector General. There she worked as a program evaluator with additional
training in internal audit and fraud prevention before being promoted to Assistant Inspector
General for Inspections and Evaluations. Immediately before joining BGR, she served as Deputy
Commissioner for Public Affairs in the Louisiana Department of Insurance.

Mowbray’s work abroad during periods of intense political change has also informed her
perspective on democracy and civil society-building. She worked as an editor at an English-
language newspaper and taught at a journalism school in Jakarta, Indonesia, on a professional
fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation during Indonesia’s final years under an
authoritarian regime. She also taught English in former Czechoslovakia in the first wave of
teachers as Eastern Europe began to open up in 1990.

Mowbray’s work is anchored by master’s degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
She graduated from Skidmore College with a major in political science and minor in English.