I would like to welcome you, personally and also on behalf of Pompeu Fabra university (UPF), to our website. As you browse around these pages, you can gain access to the information they provide on our academic institution, an institution that has succeeded in consolidating its teaching and research project and in reaping a high yield from the resources allocated to it by society ever since it was first established by the Government of Catalonia in 1990.
The UPF is a university that is committed to public-institution values; it is a city university engaged in the active, dynamic life of the city of Barcelona, and a university that is wide open to the world beyond. Public, city-based, and cosmopolitan: those are the values that identify us as an institution working in the service of society.
Our primary aims are to educate responsible professional people and citizens committed to the values of civic life, and to contribute to the development of research, the transfer of technology and the cultivation of innovation as the driving forces behind progress for society in the twenty-first century. Continuous innovation and improvement in teaching and in technology, the good academic performance of our students, the successful passage of our graduates into the professional world, the university’s high internationalisation index, and its high standing in the sphere of research: these all feature among the aspects that contribute to the reputation our institution has been building up over the fifteen years of its history. We are now in a position to state that the UPF’s activity indicators are a benchmark for Catalonia’s university system.
Teaching work at the UPF is currently focused on the social sciences and the humanities, health and life sciences, and communication in its twin aspects of content and technology. As regards research, aside from its consolidation in the social sciences and humanities, the UPF is leading two outstanding projects: the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, and the Barcelona Media Park, the latter being a large-scale infrastructure for education, research and production work in the spheres of communication and technology, and both projects serving to complement and complete the University’s research map. We also have a wide range of third-cycle and post-graduate studies, and that range is kept constantly tuned to the needs of society’s professional and production sectors.
All universities, and the UPF among them, are now going through a very special period: the challenge now facing us is to prepare for the far-reaching changes entailed in the process of convergence leading to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), scheduled to arrive in 2010. In view of this new university environment, the UPF has set a number of highly important lines of action in motion in order to position itself prominently among the universities of Europe.
I hope that the information provided in this website will help you to become acquainted with all our work and projects, and with the aims and values of our institution.