Carlos González de Escalada (PhD)

• Chairman of the Board of Samu Foundation (Samu First Response)
• Chairman & CEO of SAMU Group
• President of the International Campus for Security and Defence (CISDE)
• Vicepresident of the Sustainable Planet Foundation
• Doctor of Social Science (PhD)
• Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
• Master’s Degree in Security, Defence and Geostrategy (MA)
• Bachelor of Arts Degree in Information Studies (BA, Hons)
• Professor of Madrid Open University
• Academic Researcher at the University of Huelva

Carlos González de Escalada Álvarez is currently the Chairman & CEO of Grupo Samu, whose headquarters are in Seville, Spain. Samu is an entity with 3,030 employees that specialises in health and social services. He is also President of the International Campus for Security and Defence (CISDE), President of the Sustainable Planet Foundation, Professor at Madrid Open University and a tenured Professor of the Andalusian Academy of History.

Career

Carlos González de Escalada was born in Seville in 1971. He studied primary and secondary school at the “White Fathers” School of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart in the city, and finished his studies at TC Roberson High in North Carolina, USA. He completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Information Studies at the University of Navarre between 1989 and 2004, and spent his last year at the François Rabelais University of Tours (France) on an Erasmas programme. He embarked on his professional career in
2004, when he worked in Madrid as an editor for ABC and Expansión. He later started to study Marketing and Management and in1996 he travelled to Paris, where he studied Marketing at Ecole Européenne des Affaires, combining his studies with a scholarship at the Chamber of Commerce of Spain and France in 1998. In 1999, Carlost ravelled to London to study a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) at the Henley Management College (University of Reading) business school. In 2014, he successfully completed a Master’s Degree in Security, Defence and Geostrategy (MA) at Madrid Open University. That same year, he commenced his PhD studies at the same university.

In 2017 he completed his PhD studies at Madrid Open University (UDIMA) with a dissertation entitled “History of Leadership in Spain; origin of the term and contemporary evolution of the concept of Leader”, which was awarded a “cum laude” distinction.

His professional experience includes working as a management consultant for companies such as  British Airways, Deutsche Bank, Cirsa, Ernst & Young and others. Carlos has lived and worked in the UK, the USA, France and Spain. He has had professional dealings in more than 39 countries and is fluent in English and French, as well as having some knowledge of German and Italian. He is currently President and CEO of Samu, a leading entity in the health services and social care sector, with more than 128 centres in six countries. He is also the Chairman and CEO of Samu Corporation, wich encompass many of the group’s commercial subsidiaries: including information technology, digital transformation, consulting, catering, construction, maintenance security and renewable energies.
He is the editor of the Group’s sectoral magazine “Revista Samu”, which is distributed in 30 countries and has 11,000 subscribers. Carlos has also started up an international business consultancy project, in which he has offered advice to the US financial company Micro Finance International Corporation, the British company Trigon Consultancy and the Seville-based engineering firm Gescoand.

In 2009, Carlos set up the International Campus for Security and Defence – CISDE, which today has more than 6,800 students in Spain and Latin America. Said Campus is the largest Spanish language distance education platform of courses on security, defence, intelligence, law enforcement, military history and strategic studies. In 2016, as an editor, he founded the scientific journal Revista de Pensamiento Estratégico y Seguridad CISDE. He is currently Co-director of various official Master’s Degrees and Degrees awarded by UDIMA and CEU and Professor of Master’s Degree dissertations.
He is a Member of the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES), the Spanish Society of Crisis Medicine, where he occupied an important position on the Organisation Committees of the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Crisis Medicine Conferences held in Seville from 2003 to 2006, as well as a Member of the Organisation Committee of the Crisis Task Force Joint Exercise in its 2009-2012 editions. He is President of the Spanish Association of Former Students of Henley, Vice-President of the Andalusian Association for the Defence of Competition and a Member of the Spanish Confederation of Directorsand Executives. He is also a Member of UNICEF and a former student of the Goodenough College in London.

Carlos is the author of the books “Quiero ser un líder” (I Want to Be a Leader), CISDE Editorial, 2019 and “Guía para Trotamundos de Cuello Blanco”, editorial Almuzara 2007, as well as of several manuals and articles on Management and other disciplines, such as “Manual de Gestión de Proyectos Internacionales”, “Project Based Management” and Gestión de Calidad en Empresas de Salud”, among others.

Carlos is an honorific lieutenant in the Spanish Army after joining as a voluntary reservist in 2005. As an officer, he had the opportunity to participate in CIOR-NATO international forums. He was stationed at the El Copero Military Base in Seville and is the honorific delegate in Seville of the ARES Association of Spanish Reservist Officers. As a voluntary reservist officer, Carlos founded the digital publication “Observatorio de Seguridad y Defensa”, of which he is the editor, with 6,000 subscribers per month (which has now been integrated into CISDE).

In November 2012, he became a full member of the Andalusian Academy of History.

He is currently Vice-president of The Illustrious Royal Order of Saint Ferdinand of Sevilla.