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member of the editorial board of several historical journals. The jury also placed particular emphasis on how committed Montserrat Duch was to the empowerment of women and their civic and political participation, two areas in which women still find many barriers. She was co-founder of the Residents’ Association of Constantí, the Constantí Study Centre and the local Socialist Group. She was also the first woman to be a member of the local council. Subsequently she was a member of the Catalan Parliament for the Socialist party (1995–2003) and spokeswomen for the group of education and equality. As a member of the executive of the Catalan Socialist party, she was national secretary for universities and research, and senator in
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representation of the Catalan Government (2001–2003). Between 2006 and 2010 she was a member of the URV’s governance team under the rector Francesc Xavier Grau. As a vice-rector, she fought to implement the equality policy in the university and she chaired the committee that drafted the first equality plan (2007–2010). It was one of the first to be drafted by the Catalan and Spanish universities, and it preceded Spanish legislation striving to attain effective equality between men and women. As a result of the Plan, a standing body was set up – the Observatory of Equality – to promote reflection and action on gender issues. In this period, the URV awarded the first honorary degrees to women.
The Equality Week focuses on welfare policies Welfare and equality polices were the main focus of the URV’s Sixth Equality Week which, between 4 and 14 March organised seven training days for several postgraduate programmes and society in general. Its aim was for students and citizens to be introduced to various knowledge areas from the perspective of equality between men and women, and to find out how women have contributed to these areas.
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This year the focus was on the design, implementation and results of equality policies in such spheres as education, employment, the health services and gender violence. A study was also made of the situation of women in a wide range of different historical and geographical contexts and equality policies were analysed as tools that can guarantee better welfare for the population as a whole.
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Equality plans for Latin-American universities The URV’s Observatory of Equality supervises the creation of equality plans for several Latin-American universities. The project Equality, of which the URV is a part, is about to start its second year, during which the equality plans of the participating universities will be designed and structures will be created to promote gender equality. The beginning of the second year of the project Equality coincided with the visit to the URV of the scientific coordinator of the project, Ana Rosa Ruiz, coordinator of the Office of Gender Equity of the Technology Institute of Costa Rica on 12 and 13 February. Equality is a cooperation project between Europe and Latin America. It is
funded by the ALFA III programme of the European Commission, and its aim is to reinforce gender equality in higher education institutions. In its second year, equality plans will be designed for those participating universities that do not have one and the structures required to implement them will be created (for example, committees, observatories or equality units) depending on the needs of each institution. Thus, Equality is continuing along the lines that it started in 2012 with the formation of equality policies and female leadership in the participating universities.
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ETSE’s Girls’ Day attracts 70 girls
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Some 70 girls from seven secondary schools in five different municipalities in the Tarragona region took part in the 2nd Girls’ Day on 27 February organised by the School of Engineering and the Observatory of Equality. This initiative gets women who play leading roles in academia and business to make girls more aware of the engineering subjects and revert the masculine dominance of some university degrees. The engineering and technical degrees are highly valued because of the professional opportunities they provide. However, there are many factors that prevent girls from choosing them. Of the 476 students registered
on the seven engineering programmes at the URV this year (2012-2013), only 61 (12.8%) are boys, a similar proportion to two years ago (14.4%). The degrees with fewest girls are Computer Engineering, Industrial Electronics and Automation, and Electrical Engineering (all of which have less than 10%) and Mechanical Engineering and Telematics (with 11.2%). On the other hand, in 21 of the 37 degrees at the URV, the proportion of new female students is greater than 80%. They are all social science degrees.
Collaboration with universities in Africa Vânia Manuela Alfredo Matola, from Mozambique, and Rina Mandimbiniana, from Madagascar, won the two Graça Machel grants provided by the Fundación Universidad.es. This pilot programme, in collaboration with Canon Collins Trust, is aimed at women from the countries of southern Africa. The two women were awarded the last two annual grants that were offered, which consisted of a four-month Spanish course, attendance on the master’s degree in Techniques of Tourism Analysis and Innovation at the Faculty of Tourism and Geography in Vila-seca and funding amounting to €1,100 a month.
Vânia Manuela Alfredo Matola and Rina Mandimbiniana finished the master’s degree in September and have now returned to their countries. The purpose of the Graça Machel programme is to reinforce the relationships with other international bodies in the sphere of higher education to help the Spanish university system to become more visible internationally. It also seeks to carry out university development cooperation by helping to train human resources in sub-Saharan Africa, with particular emphasis on gender equality.
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Jean-Paul Malrieu: scientist and humanist The French scientist Jean-Paul Malrieu was awarded an honorary doctorate at the URV on 29 January. He was accompanied by around thirty colleagues from other Catalan and Spanish universities, and focused his speech on the relationship between science and the market. The sponsor of the new honorary doctor was the URV professor Rosa Caballol, a quantum chemistry researcher who has worked with Malrieu for many years. She discussed his personality and described him as “a distinguished member of the scientific community.” Caballol recalled his early days as a researcher in the Latin Quarter in Paris in the late sixties, where he was part of a group of young researchers, full of talent and commitment to a science at that stage was still new, halfway between physics and chemistry - quantum chemistry - and who were also concerned about social issues. Malrieu has been working intensively at the Quantum Physics Laboratory in Toulouse since 1974 and with the director Philippe Durand, he is the man behind an extremely long and fruitful period for this very friendly and cheerful group, who have unselfishly made calculation programs available to other researchers. Rosa Caballol described him as a scientist with boundless curiosity, in the intellectual and cultural sphere, who has a very unusual humanist profile. His life has marked by a concern for the role of science in society. In his investment speech, after thanking the University for the honour bestowed on him, Malrieu joked about his acceptance, saying that it gives him the image of an unconventional scientist, “an old fighter of lost battles.” He noted his affection for and debt he owed to the Quantum Chemistry group at the URV, to other groups in Catalonia and the Iberian peninsula, and in central Spain and Madrid, as he has collaborated intensely with them during his career in the form of research visits in both directions. On the subject that concerns him most, the relationship between science and the market, he explained that in France his generation fought against and defeated hierarchical privileges, the formal rigidities of the previous generation of scientists, but the current situation is not encouraging. This is because the previous shortcomings have been replaced by a “pseudoeffectiveness” based on figures and calculations, individual assessments, the competition of all against
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all, the uncertainty surrounding funding and the positions of younger scientists. In short, neoliberalism has taken root within the research field. “Life has become hell for scientists,” he said. “Bibliometrics, the measurement of our contributions on the basis of the number of publications and citations obtained are killing science,” he noted. There is no longer any time to read, or to concentrate in order to think. Jean Paul Malrieu also reflected in a philosophical, moral and almost poetic way about his position on quantum chemistry. A pioneer in quantum chemistry methodology Jean-Paul Malrieu is currently Emeritus Professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He was born in Colmar (Toulouse, France, 1939), and is one of the most important quantum chemists of his generation. He has always focused on understanding the underlying physics in chemical systems to be able to subsequently study their properties rationally. He was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and soon published pioneering studies of quantum chemical methodology, such as his proposal for the CIPSI calculation method. He has developed guidelines for selecting the most important contributions of electron correlation, detailed analyses of the electronic factors that contribute to magnetic coupling, procedures to condense the information provided by calculations, and efficient solutions to address the important problem of N- dependence. He has produced more than 350 high level articles. He has won awards, such as the Grand Prix Pierre Süe from the French Chemistry Society (1994) and was admitted to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences in 1999. Jean Paul Malrieu played a major role in the creation of a school of knowledge. His influence on Spanish quantum chemistry is a reflection of that, and is the reason why he was awarded the Catalán-Sabatier prize by the Spanish Royal Chemistry Society (2003). You can see an intervieu via the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcNd_gq7LA4&list=PLD252B9 AB2635E87B&index=3
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Phil Douglas Jones, the extent of climate change The pioneering scientist in the study of global warming and climate change, Philip Douglas Jones, was awarded a doctorate honoris causa in the Paranimf of the URV on 15 November. He is Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in England, and is internationally recognized for his pioneering contribution to estimating global warming and for his contributions to the science of climate change. His sponsor was the Professor of the Department of Geography and Director of the Centre for Climate Change (C3) at the URV, Manola Brunet. The department proposed his nomination. Philip Douglas Jones (born in Surrey, England, in 1952) has calculated global warming by creating global and hemispheric
series of air temperatures, which have been widely used for various scientific assessments contained in reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in roder to document recent climatic and thermal drift. He received his doctorate in Hydrology from the School of Applied Sciences of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England, and since 1976 he has been working at the Climatic Research Unit (School of Environmental Sciences), where he is now the director. The centre is an international leader in the study of climate variability and change and in the creation of databases and climate products on a global scale. Since then, he has made a significant contribution to instrumental research on climate change, to the paleoapproximate Continued on the next page 6
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