ShareMaría Concepción López-Fernández and Marc Girona Badia, new members of the Institutional and Programme Review Commission
María Concepción López-Fernández, full professor of Business Organisation at the University of Cantabria, and Marc Girona Badia, PhD student at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), have been appointed by AQU Catalunya Governing Board as members of the Institutional and Programme Review Commission for a 4-year term.
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The Governing Board has appointed Dr María Concepción López-Fernández, professor of Business Organisation at the University of Cantabria, and Mr Marc Girona Badia, PhD student at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), as new members of the Institutional and Programme Review Commission for a term of 4 years.
Dr López-Fernández, in addition to being a professor of Business Organisation, is director of the Santander Family Business Chair at the University of Cantabria. Her research focuses on three areas: business management (business strategy, innovation management, quality and flexibility analysis); corporate entrepreneurship, and family business. She has supervised nine doctoral theses, two of which have received the extraordinary doctoral award from the University of Cantabria. Dr López-Fernández has held various academic management positions; she was dean of the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of Cantabria (1996-2004) and vice-rector of Academic and Teaching Organization and Internationalization (2006-2013). She also has experience in degree programme quality assurance as a member of external assessment committees with ANECA, with the Portuguese Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES) and with the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
Mr Girona Badia holds two bachelor's degree, in Marine Technologies and in Systems Engineering and Naval Technologies, and a university master's degree in Automatic Systems Engineering and Industrial Electronics. In the university field, he was student delegate of the Barcelona School of Nautical Studies from 2016 to 2018 (ex officio member of the UPC faculty, of the UPC Student Council and of the school's Permanent Committee and board) and was class delegate for his master's degree in the 2019-2021 academic year. He is currently a representative of the PDI-B2 group on the 2023 council of the UPC Department of Electrical Engineering.
Dr López-Fernández and Mr Girona Badia will be joining the Institutional and Programme Review Commission (CAIP), which ensures that the set of quality assurance instruments and processes carried out by AQU Catalunya at the institutional and programme level are applied correctly. The CAIP's work can be grouped into two main areas: the quality of education and the quality of institutions. In carrying out its functions, the CAIP works in specific commissions.
The chair of the Institutional and Programme Review Commission has appointed Dr López-Fernández as chair of the specific commission for the assessment of official doctoral degree programmes.