Past Events

International Women's Day 2022

About our panelists...

Pauline Kao assumed duty as Consul General for the U.S. Consulate General in Düsseldorf, covering the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in August 2021.

Before her assignment to Germany, Ms. Kao was the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Shanghai, China.

Her first diplomatic posting was as Vice Consul for Economic and Consular Affairs in Tokyo, Japan, from 2002 – 2004. Thereafter, she served as Assistant Information Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, Germany, Staff Officer for the Secretary of State in Washington D.C., and Political Officer at the U.S. Mission to NATO, in Brussels, Belgium. Ms. Kao also served as the Deputy Chief of the Economic Section at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, and as Foreign Policy Advisor to the Special Operations Command, Indo-Pacific (SOCPAC) in Hawaii. From 2011-2012, she was the Transatlantic Fellow at the German Federal Foreign Office, working at the International Organizations Human Rights Directorate.

Pauline Kao obtained her Master of Laws as a Fulbright Scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She holds a Juris Doctorate and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington. Before joining the State Department, Ms. Kao practiced corporate law at a German law firm in Berlin. The most unusual job she held was as a whitewater rafting guide in the Pacific Northwest.


Sabine Pittrof
is a partner at international law firm Squire Patton Boggs. Sabine specialises in mergers and acquisitions and corporate law with an industry focus on renewable energies, having worked in her field for around 20 years. Sabine also heads up Squire Patton Boggs’ Australian Desk in Germany.

Sabine’s association with Australia goes back more than 25 years. In addition to her German law degree, she holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New South Wales in Sydney; her PhD thesis focused on Australian constitutional law. In 1997, she established DeAN – Deutsch-Australisches Netzwerk e.V., the German-Australian Alumni Association.

Sabine has been a member of the German Australian Business Council for over 20 years, joining the board in 2010. Sabine has held the Chair for ten years, which predominantly involves corporate and international liaison and raising the profile of the German Australian Business Council, demonstrated inter alia in two interviews with Deutsche Welle.

Heather Zeoli hails from Michagan, in the upper midwest of the States, where she originally studied Communications and English at the Grand Valley State University and continued on to obtain her masters in non-profit leadership. Since then she has worked managing development for a number of academic and health care institutions, with her primary focus being in fundraising leadership and administration, and managing all the multiple facets that entails. For the past 6 years she has been the Director of Development and Volunteer Services at Metropolitan Library System of Oklahoma County.