Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal studied Law and Languages. After two Traineeships in banking (London and Vienna), he joined the Austrian Foreign Service in 1985. Assignments with Austrian Embassies in Riyadh, New Delhi, Washington, as Austrian Consul General in Los Angeles, as Head of Department for Citizen Services and Spokesperson for the Austrian Foreign Ministry followed. From 2012 to 2014 he served as United Nations Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information, in New York, and took over his present role in August 2014.
Development Cooperation as well as Humanitarian Assistance have played an integral part of his career, starting with responsibilities in Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, in the mid-eighties to his role on communicating the MDGs as well as the post-2015 Development Agenda from New York, to which Humanitarian Assistance around the world as well as efforts to explain the relevance of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Assistance during the current European Year for Development, have lately been added to.