Pilar Paneque Salgado, appointed new director of ANECA

The Governing Board of ANECA, meeting on 28 February 2023, has appointed Pilar Paneque Salgado, Professor of Human Geography at the Pablo de Olavide University (UPO) in Seville, as the new Director of the Agency. With an extensive career, Paneque Salgado joined the Andalusian university in 2000 and there she directs the Global Change Research Lab Research Group. Her research career has been characterised by international activity, participation in interdisciplinary networks and teams - which she has led for more than fifteen years - and by the training of young researchers. 

The new director of ANECA, aged 48, has extensive experience in academic and research management, having been, among others, director of Postgraduate Studies, vice-rector of Planning and Quality and director of the Board of Trustees at the International University of Andalusia (UNIA), as well as director of the Campus of International Excellence of Environment, Biodiversity and Global Change (UPO), a project in which she coordinated seven Andalusian universities and the CSIC.

In terms of management, she has also been a member of the European Space, Quality and Teaching Innovation Sector of the Association of Andalusian Public Universities (AUPA), of the Programme Contract Committee of the Andalusian Regional Government's Department of University Affairs, and of the Sustainability Group of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), among other working groups.

In addition to this, she has been scientific coordinator of the Geography area in the Social Sciences panel of the State Research Agency (AEI), where she has been responsible for the management of the different calls for projects, networks and human resources of the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation, as well as calls from other public bodies managed by the AEI.

Her words at the Governing Council
In her presentation, Pilar Paneque thanked the Ministry of Universities for her proposal, which she assumed, aware of the responsibility it entails and the moment of change in which the university system finds itself.

The new Director of ANECA presented her career to the members of the Governing Council, highlighting the significance of the incorporation of a person of her generation and her academic and scientific profile to the Agency.

Paneque has also advanced some of the lines of action that he proposes for this new stage, which will be guided by permanent dialogue and by the advance towards a new evaluation framework, which brings us closer to the European context and to principles such as open science, and which reduces the bureaucracy and stress to which, he says, we are subjected to the system.

In addition, he told the Governing Council that he wishes to establish a very horizontal working model with the necessary instruments to facilitate a continuous debate with all the agents involved in the promotion and assurance of quality, so that, in a collaborative manner and by adding experiences and knowledge, we can improve the university reality that we are producing and reproducing.

Research
Her doctoral training - which she completed with stays at the Universities of Utrecht (Netherlands), Pennsylvania (United States) and Oxford (United Kingdom) - focuses on the study of water and land policy. In 2005 she began her activity as principal investigator of research projects, focusing her work on the study of water risks, especially droughts, and on the analysis of the social and institutional vulnerability associated with these risks in a context of climate change, with work that has been referenced by the IPCC and that ANECA itself has so far recognised with 5 six-year research and transfer periods. 

In the postdoctoral stage, she carried out further research and specialisation stays at Harvard-RCC University, at the National Drought Mitigation Center (University of Nebraska) and at the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute (University of South Carolina), in the United States, and extended her lines of research to the study of other risks (floods, heat waves) and to the construction of strategies for adaptation to the effects of climate change with participatory, deliberative and citizen science approaches.

She has been principal investigator of 14 research projects funded in competitive calls (7 of them European), in the framework of which she has directed more than 20 research technicians, and has participated as a researcher in another 10 projects. She has also received a mention for Teaching Excellence in the Docentia programme and her training capacity, with the supervision of 11 doctoral theses by geographers, environmentalists, sociologists, engineers, biologists, historians, economists and architects -which shows the interdisciplinary nature of her research-, and the current supervision of another 8. 

In relation to her activity in scientific associations and societies, she is a member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Association of Geography (AGE, 2017-2021) and of the Governing Board of the New Water Culture Foundation (FNCA, 2010-2013). She is also a member of the Spanish Association of Climatology (AEC), Waterlat-Gobacit, the European Drought Center (EDC) and the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT).