The UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (UNESCO-IESALC) is pleased to announce to government and university authorities, national and international institutes, and to the academic community at large, the official appointment, since May 20 2019, of Dr. Francesc Pedró as its new Director.

Dr. Pedró has been, since 2011, Chief of Section of Education Policy at the Division for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems of the UNESCO Education Sector in Paris. Along with his team, Pedró has conducted educational policy evaluations in Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular in the Bahamas, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and St. Kitts and Nevis. He has also contributed to the reinforcement of the work of the Education Sector regarding the right to education and the use of technology, including the launch of UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week in 2012.

With degrees in Philosophy and in Education from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (1981), and a PhD in Compared Education from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, in Madrid (UNED, 1985), Pedró also holds a post-doctorate in Public Policies of Education from the Institute of Education of London University (1986).

He started his profession in 1980 as an assistant professor at the UNED, in Madrid, where he developed his academic career and became an associate professor of comparative education and educational policy. He worked for the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), with missions to Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala related to the development of education policies. He was visiting professor at the Indiana University Bloomington (EE.UU.) in 1987.

From 1988 to 1994, Francesc Pedró was in charge of the evaluation of education policies and tertiary education for the Ministry of Education and the President’s Bureau of Catalonia. From 1994 to 1998, as vice president in charge of research, he participated in the creation of the Open University of Catalonia, the first European university to offer exclusively online courses. In 1999, he was appointed the president of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, where he was deputy rector of the academic program on quality. From 2002 to 2004, he led the national system of access to higher education. He received the Vicens Vives Prize to excellence on university innovation in 2003.

In 2004, he was appointed senior policy analyst at the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation in Paris, France, where he led projects on learners of the new millennium and research and systemic innovation in education. Francesc Pedró has written many books and scientific articles in various fields of politics of education, on teaching innovation in higher education, being the best known the international comparative studies on teaching entitled Fauna Académica. La profesión docente en las universidades europeas (Barcelona: UOC, 2004), as well as a book on the impact of the use of technology among higher education students entitled Connected Minds – Technology and today’s learners (OECD, 2012).