The Mason Spirit

In December, Ángel Cabrera was unanimously selected by Mason’s Board of Visitors to become the sixth president in the university’s history. Cabrera will assume the office on July 1.

“I am honored to have been asked to lead one of the most innovative institutions in American higher education,” says Cabrera. “I am humbled to follow in the footsteps of a great educator and leader, President Alan Merten, and I look forward to working with such a talented community of faculty and administrators.”

For the past eight years, Cabrera has been president of the prestigious Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, which is ranked consistently as the leading school of international business in the world. Previously, he was professor and dean at IE Business School in Madrid, Spain, often listed by the international media among the top European business schools.

Cabrera is respected throughout the world for his expertise in global business education. In 2007, the United Nations asked him to chair the international task force that developed the Principles for Responsible Management Education, a voluntary framework to promote global corporate citizenship subscribed to by more than 300 business schools worldwide. He has also been recognized by the Aspen Institute as a Henry Crown Fellow and by Financial Times as one of the top 20 business school leaders in the world.

An outspoken advocate of corporate social responsibility and management responsibility, Cabrera in 2005 inspired a student-led initiative that resulted in Thunderbird becoming the first business school in the world to formally adopt a professional oath of honor, a commitment to social responsibility and professional ethics taken by all graduate students.

Cabrera has a PhD and an MS in cognitive psychology from Georgia Tech and a BS and an MS in engineering from Madrid Polytechnical University, Spain’s premier engineering school.

He is married to Beth Cabrera, a renowned organizational psychologist. She is a senior research fellow at Thunderbird and a former professor at Arizona State University and Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. They have two children.