Jeffrey Gedmin


Jeffrey Gedmin is an American scholar and author. He is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University and at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. He was President and CEO of the Legatum Institute in London from 2011 to 2014 and the former President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 2007 to 2011.

Early life and education

Gedmin was born in Washington, DC and raised in Northern Virginia.
He earned his bachelor of arts degree in music from American University and also studied musicology for a year at the University of Salzburg in Austria. He earned his master's degree in German Area Studies from American University. He received his PhD from Georgetown University in German Area Studies and Linguistics. He is fluent in German.

Career

Gedmin served for nearly six years as Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, a non-profit, non-partisan organization whose mission is "to foster 'enlightened' leadership and open-minded dialogue." From 1996 to 2001, Gedmin was a resident scholar and Executive Director of the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative, a coalition of international institutes, politicians, leading journalists, and business executives seeking to revitalize and expand the Atlantic community of democracies. Leading supporters and participants included Václav Havel, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and US Senators Jesse Helms and Joseph Biden.
Gedmin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the board of the Council for a Community of Democracies and the Program of Atlantic Security Studies. In addition, he has taught at Georgetown University and Gonzaga College High School in Washington, DC.
Gedmin has been a frequent contributor to leading US and European newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Times.
Gedmin has authored several books, including . He edited a collection of essays titled . Gedmin served as co-executive producer for two major PBS documentaries: The Germans, Portrait of a New Nation, and Spain's 9/11 and the Challenge of Radical Islam in Europe''.
Gedmin left the Legatum Institute in early 2014. He is currently a Research Council Member at the National Endowment for Democracy, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University and at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
In October 2018 he was appointed Editor-In-Chief of The American Interest.

Personal life

In 1993, Gedmin married Jeana Williams. They have a daughter.