John P. Grant Dies; Overseas AID Official

John Putnam Grant, 48, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Bulgaria, died Jan. 7 in London after a stroke. Mr. Grant was stricken in Sophia, where he had remained as the agency's Y2K duty officer over the holidays. He was flown to a hospital in London, where he died.

An AID officer for the past 15 years, Mr. Grant had been in Bulgaria since January 1999 as chief of the AID mission. Earlier, he was in Washington as chief of AID's office of private and voluntary cooperation, and before that he had been an AID official in Togo and New Delhi.

Before joining AID, he was chief of the Latin American and Caribbean Program for Save the Children, a private, nonprofit organization. He also had been director of Save the Children in Mexico.

Mr. Grant was the fourth generation in his family to have been involved overseas assistance programs. His father, James P. Grant, was a former chief of UNICEF, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had been involved in the establishment of hospitals in China.

He born in Washington and graduated from Wilson High School. He was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and received a master's degree in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Survivors include his wife, Marea Hatziolos Grant, and two sons, James and Alexander, all of Sophia; two brothers, James D. Grant of Fairfield, Iowa, and William J. Grant of Johannesburg; and his stepmother, Ellan Young Grant of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.