Juan Manuel Santos was the President of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, and the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for “his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end.”

He was one of the initial promoters of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that became the world’s agenda in 2015 (he officially proposed them in the Rio+20 Summit in 2012). For his aggressive environmental policies to protect his country’s biodiversity and fight climate change, he was awarded the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew International Medal and the Wildlife Conservation Society Theodore Roosevelt Award for Conservation Leadership. Furthermore, the National Geographic Society honored him for his unwavering commitment to conservation and Conservation International awarded him the Global Visionary Award.

Before being President, he was Minister of Foreign Trade, Minister of Finance and Minister of Defense. Santos graduated with honors from the Colombian Naval Academy in Cartagena. He holds a Business and Economics degree from the University of Kansas (1969) and did postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics (1973-1974), in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and at Harvard University as a Fulbright fellow, where he obtained a Master’s in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government (1981). He was a Nieman Fellow (1987-1988) and Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow also at Harvard (2018-2019). He has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees in various universities, including La Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

President Santos is currently the Chairman of the Board of COMPAZ Foundation, which he created to promote peace, protect the environment and fight poverty. He is also part of The Elders and the Global Commission on Drug Policy, as well as a member of the board of the International Crisis Group and the Wildlife Conservation Society. He is a visiting professor at Oxford University. In addition, he was recently elected as a member of the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees, and he was appointed as Arnhold Distinguished Fellow by Conservation International.