In the summer of 1949, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and classic Hollywood star Gary Cooper became friends. They met in what was then a mining town in the state of Colorado, USA, and today is one of the most expensive towns in the world, with chalets worth a hundred million dollars: Aspen. They were invited there by billionaire Walter Paepcke, who had organized a conference to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of the German writer Wolfgang von Goethe.
Aspen Institute was born there, a combination of a think tank, a social action center, and the most influential idea exchange forum in the United States. 'Aspen', as it is colloquially known, is particularly relevant for two events it organizes every summer in the town where it was born: the Aspen Ideas Festival - whose edition of this year begins in ten days - of a cultural nature, and the Aspen Security Forum, in July, which is the American version of the Munich Security Conference.
Almost 77 years later, a Spanish man, Ángel Cabrera, has been appointed president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. Cabrera, 59, thus becomes the first person not born in the United States to lead the organization, which over these almost eight decades has expanded to seventeen other countries, including Spain, where Aspen Institute celebrated its fifteen years of existence in April in an event attended by King Felipe VI.
Cabrera has been active professionally in the United States for over two decades, since leaving his position as dean at IE Business School in 2004 to become the head of Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. From there, he became the president of George Mason University in Virginia in 2012. Currently, he is the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology (colloquially known as Georgia Tech). Throughout this time, Cabrera, born in Madrid, is a Telecommunications Engineer from the Polytechnic University of that city.