Carolina Barco Isakson was born in Boston in 1951, the daughter of an American mother and a Colombian father, who was then a graduate student at MIT.   She received a B.A. in Sociology and Economics from Wellesley College in 1973, a Master’s in City Planning from Harvard in 1975, and later an MBA from Instituto de Empresas in Madrid, Spain in 1984. Working in city planning and planning research, both in Venezuela and Colombia, Barco was working for the city of Bogotá when her father Virgillio Barco, became President of Colombia in 1986. In 1989, she fled to the United States under threat of kidnapping by the Medellín drug cartel, and became a visiting scholar at MIT for two years. She was Director of City Planning for Bogotá from 1999 until 2002, when incoming Colombian President Álvaro Uribe appointed her Foreign Minister. In August 2006, when the previous Ambassador to the U.S., ex-Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, resigned, she was appointed Ambassador to the United States.