Organisation

RAMÓN GONZALO GARCÍA

Telephone: 948 16 9103
E-mail: rector@unavarra.es

Biography

Ramón Gonzalo García (Logroño, La Rioja, 1972) graduated in Telecommunications Engineering, with Extraordinary Merit, from the Public University of Navarre (1995), where he also obtained a PhD (2000), earning the maximum grade and a European Doctor mention. He joined the UPNA as an Assistant Professor in 1995 before becoming a Tenured Professor in 2003 and taking the Chair in Signal Theory and Communications in 2010. As a researcher, he belongs to the university’s Institute of Smart Cities (ISC).

His most outstanding research includes the designs for the Hispasat, Astra and Amazonas satellite dishes, and the development of terahertz (THz) technology for use in the design of new airport cameras, medical imaging systems and different types of sensor. He has represented the Spanish Ministry of Defence on different NATO SET panels on research and technology, and has sat on the Management Committee of the European Virtual Institute of Metamaterial Research.

He has directed and been in charge of 24 research projects with public entities funded by the Government of Navarre, the Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitiveness, the Ministry of Industry, the European Space Agency, the Sixth and Seventh Framework Programmes, and Horizon 2020. He has also taken part in a further 28 research projects and more than 25 R&D contracts with companies and the government, 13 of these as principal investigator. He has co-registered 5 patents, two of which have been filed as international patents. He has performed research at the European Space Agency (Netherlands), the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (England) and Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (Germany). As a visiting researcher, he has worked on the European Space Agency’s STAR TIGER programme, developed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (England), where he also took part in the Silicon Microfabrication Programme as principal investigator.

He has written seven book chapters, more than a hundred JCR-indexed publications (2 invited), more than two hundred papers for international conferences (35 invited) and more than fifty for national conferences (4 invited). He is an assessor for Framework Programme Space and FET projects, and other research programmes run by the Community of Madrid, EraPerMEd, the Ministry, ANEP (National Agency for Assessment and Foresight) and UEFISCDI (Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation). He reviews articles for 17 scientific journals, including "Nature Photonics". He has supervised nine doctoral theses (five with international or European mentions) and more than forty final year undergraduate projects.

He has earned the Public University of Navarre’s Research Prize for Exact, Biological, Medical and Technical Sciences, awarded for his entire career (2013); a European Space Agency Award for his contribution to the development of a new antenna device (1999); the Nokia Award for the best Doctoral Thesis on Mobile Internet and Third Generation Mobile Solutions, awarded by the Official Association of Telecommunications Engineers (2001); four prizes for best paper at international congresses and conferences; the 2010 Engineer of the Year Award from the Association of Telecommunications Engineers of La Rioja; and the 2010 Crea EIBT Prize for the Best Technology-based Business Project.

Ramón organised the 30th National Symposium of the International Union of Radio Science, URSI 2015, the international 2008 Metamaterials Congress and the 12th European School on Metamaterials: Antennas based on metamaterials technology and their applications, all held in Pamplona, the 27th ESA Antenna Technology Workshop on Innovative Periodic Antennas: Electromagnetic Bandgap, Left-handed materials and Frequency Selective Surfaces, held in Santiago de Compostela, and the Workshop on Metamaterials for Optics and Microwave applications, held in San Sebastián. He has sat on a number of technical committees and organised several special sessions at international conferences on high-frequency, microwave and antenna technology.

His experience in the field of academic management includes serving as Deputy Head of the UPNA’s School of Industrial and ICT Engineering (ETSIIT), director of the Bachelor's Degree in Telecommunications Engineering (2006 to 2008) and Head of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department (2008 to 2010). He also took part in the work groups which designed the Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering and the Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering, for which he was in charge of quality. He sat on the Board of the School of Industrial Engineering and Telecommunications from 2006 to 2012, has been a member of the UPNA Senate since 2008 and was a member of the Research Committee from 2010 to 2015. He was Vice-rector of Research from 2015 to 2019.