Eight professors from four different departments of Pompeu Fabra University have been selected in the new call for grants of the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència programme (formerly ICREA Acadèmia) of the Government of Catalonia’s Ministry of Research and Universities, whose goal is to contribute to intensifying the research work of Catalan university faculty.

The professors who have received the distinction and the UPF departments to which they belong are Javier Arregui, Ignacio Lago and Jacint Jordana (Political and Social Sciences); Angel Lozano and Xavier Serra (Engineering), Mircea Epure and David Rossell (Economics and Business), and Rafael Maldonado (Medicine and Life Sciences). All of them are among the 50 academics who will receive these grants, each endowed with 40,000 euros per year for five years, or 200,000 euros in total.

The Acadèmia d’Excel·lència programme managed by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) is intended exclusively for teaching staff and, in particular, for professors who are in a fully active phase and are expanding their research activity. These grants seek to ensure that priority is given to research activities during the programme’s five-year duration. Apart from the eight awardees linked to UPF, 13 are attached to the UPC, 12 to the UAB, 6 to the UB, 4 to the URV, 2 to the UdG, 2 to the URL, 2 to the UdL, and 1 to the UOC.

What will the research to be intensified by the eight UPF professors involve?

Angel Lozano is a full professor with the UPF Department of Engineering, where he coordinates the Wireless & Secure Communications Research Group (WiSeCom). His research focuses on wireless networks, which are currently in their fifth generation (5G), but, in the field of research, new ideas and disruptive concepts for future 6G networks, which are expected to be deployed in the early 2030s, have been explored for some time. Lozano explains that this push towards 6G is the backdrop to his activity during the last five years: “The development of 6G networks presents great challenges related to achieving much faster connections, with minimal delays and reliable operation. The use of new frequency bands will require overcoming physical limitations in signal propagation and device design”.

He adds that networks will become smarter and more autonomous, which poses challenges to their management and reliability. At the same time, data protection, security and reducing the environmental impact of digital infrastructures will be key priorities in an increasingly complex and global environment

 

Xavier Serra is a full professor at the UPF Department of Engineering, where he heads the Music Technology Research Group (MTG). The aid obtained, granting continuity to the three ICREA Acadèmia distinctions he has previously been awarded, will allow him to expand and consolidate his research in multimodal AI models integrating audio, musical symbolic representations and text.

To this end, he will conduct research to incorporate musicological and sociocultural knowledge into these models to make them more interpretable, inclusive and aligned with the way people understand and experience music. “My work currently focuses on developing transparent and culturally informed artificial intelligence methodologies that support musical creation, the discovery of diverse repertoires and education, always from an open and ethical perspective”, Xavier Serra explains.

 

Javier Arregui is a full professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences and a researcher with the Institutions and Political Actors Research Group. His research addresses central issues on democracy, policymaking and citizenship in the European Union. The research project he will be able to boost with the support of the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència grant will be integrated with another three research projects he is currently conducting (two European and one national).

“Among other topics that I will be investigating are research questions related to policymaking in three crucial thematic areas of the EU political agenda: the regulation of artificial intelligence in a comparative perspective, EU-China relations, and the policies of the European Green Deal”, he says. He will also be assessing the outcomes of EU policies, as well as the efficiency of these policies and their tangible consequences for EU citizens.

 

 Ignacio Lago, a full professor at the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and member of the Institutions and Political Actors Research Group, studies how institutions influence the way citizens are represented. Thanks to the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència grant, over the next five years he will focus his research on three major areas.

First, he will analyse how the regional organization of power affects crisis management, including natural disasters, pandemics and security threats, and what political consequences they cause. Secondly, he will study how electoral rules influence political representation, parties’ strategic behaviour and citizens’ preferences concerning what institutions should be like, paying special attention to gender differences. Finally, he will analyse how territorial and social factors condition voting, participation and perceptions of political abandonment, focusing on inequalities between regions.

 Jacint Jordana is a full professor of Political Science and Public Administration at the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and president of the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). His main research area deals with the comparative analysis of public policies, with special emphasis on regulatory policy and its specialist institutions. The expansion of populist political movements questioning democratic rules and the alternation of power between political parties is calling the health of democratic regimes into question, while the expansion of authoritarian regimes limits the legitimacy of democracy within the framework of global governance.

The purpose of his research is to understand how and why these public institutions, which are unique in nature, emerge and how they are maintained: entities such as central banks, regulatory agencies, tax authorities, and courts of accounts, among others. “The goals of my research in the coming years, with the help of the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència grant, will focus on studying independent public institutions in the context of the liberal democracy crisis”, Jacint Jordana asserts.
 

Mircea Epure, a Serra Húnter professor at the UPF Department of Economics and Business and affiliated professor of the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE), is to investigate how companies face challenges of governance in an increasingly dynamic knowledge economy. His research will analyse how institutional uncertainty conditions corporate decisions, how innovative companies obtain funding and how management practices influence their performance, all of which are factors that affect the stability of markets, regional development and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Thanks to the Acadèmia d’Excel·lència programme, his project will combine comprehensive data analysis with close international collaboration to address these issues: “The results of my research will contribute to fuelling debates on business financing, managing uncertainty, entrepreneurship and resilience in the face of crises, and will offer guidance to policymakers and business leaders seeking to boost economic growth and social well-being”, Mircea Epure outlines.

 

David Rossell is a professor with the UPF Department of Economics and Business where he is a researcher with the Statistics, Probability and Machine Learning Research Group, an affiliated professor of the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) as well as director of the Master in Data Science Methodology at the BSE.  His research project,  which focuses on the development of theory and methods to analyse large volumes of data, has three distinctive aspects: firstly, structural learning, which in contrast to machine learning, seeks to understand the process generated by data; secondly, data integration and transfer learning, which incorporates information from various databases, with the aim of more precisely learning the structure of interest; and thirdly, the development of rapid computing methods for structural learning, which allows performing this fundamental task with greater reliability.

“The focus of my work is theoretical, but given the presence of data in all areas of knowledge, it can have a great many applications, particularly in scientific research, where beyond predictions, we wish to understand the functioning of the phenomenon studied”, David Rossell asserts.
 

Rafael Maldonado is a full professor of Neuropharmacology at the UPF Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) and director of the Laboratory of Neuropharmacology-NeuroPhar research group. His lines of research focus on studying the role of endogenous cannabinoid and opioid systems in drug dependence, neuropathic pain and affective and eating disorders, through pharmacological and molecular approaches.