Francesc Torres
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Rector
Speaker Bio
Francesc Torres Torres (1962) was the rector of the UPC from December 2017 to June 2021 and the director of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications from 2013 to 2017.
He has a degree in Telecommunications Engineering (1988) from the UPC’s Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) and a doctoral degree (1992) from the UPC’s Department of Signal Theory and Communications, where he teaches as a full professor and carries out research.
He began his career at the European Space Agency and joined the UPC as an adjunct professor of the ETSETB in 1989. In the sphere of teaching, he was the assistant director-head of studies of the ETSETB (1998-2000) and the coordinator of the international master's degree MERIT (2006-2009). He received a mention in the University Teaching Quality Improvement Award (1997) from the UPC's Board of Trustees. In the framework of the Ministry of Education's mobility programme, he spent a sabbatical year at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech (California, USA), from 2005 to 2006, where he acted as an external advisor to the GeoSTAR project, a geostationary satellite for monitoring the atmosphere.
Since 1994, as a member of the UPC's Remote Sensing Research Group (RsLab) he has participated in more than 50 industrial contracts as a scientific and technological adviser. He has co-authored more than 200 publications and received the following distinctions: the Duran Farell Award (2000) from the UPC’s Board of Trustees, the Ciutat de Barcelona Award (2001) from the Barcelona City Council, the Salvà i Campillo Award (2004) from the Catalan Association of Telecommunications Engineers and the Cristòfol Juandó Award in Aeronautics (2011) from the Barcelona City Council. He was a founding vice-chair of the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre for Ocean Salinity and Radiometric Calibration (2007-2010). He is currently a member of the UPC's CommSensLab, a 2017-2020 María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence. Since June 2025, he has been rector of the UPC.