This newspaper launches a new university channel, La Uni, a platform with the desire to amplify the voice of universities in all their dimensions, as institutions and as generators of knowledge. “The information potential of universities is enormous,” said Jordi Juan, director of La Vanguardia, at the presentation event held yesterday at the Cosmocaixa, in the presence of the rectors of the University of Barcelona, Joan Guàrdia, of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Barcelona, Javier Lafuente, and from the Polytechnic of Catalonia, Daniel Crespo. “And the newspaper, with its physical limitations, or the web, with a generalist informative desire, cannot accommodate the entire volume of information,” he continued. For this reason, “the channel was born to amplify this work”, providing visibility in Catalonia, Spain and Latin America.
The La Uni platform will offer informative and opinion articles, chronicles, interviews and videos about university life and its community. They will be presented in Catalan and Spanish. The channel is supported by the three aforementioned universities, UB, UAB and UPC.
Daniel Crespo explained that one of the “major” challenges that universities, centers of research and innovation par excellence, face is communication. “We generate a lot of information and we are very proud of what we do,” he added, “but we need a structured communication channel that helps us get closer to society.” In this sense, he indicated that one can obtain information through social networks but the veracity of the facts is only confirmed in the reference newspapers such as La Vanguardia.
In the presentation, which was led by Susana Quadrado, editor-in-chief of Society, one alumna from each institution was invited. Three women who coincide in leading cutting-edge technology fields and who explained their experience in a labor market dominated by men. Anna Navarro Schlegel, who intervened from Silicon Valley, graduated in English and German philology from the UB, trained in telecommunications and is now vice president of product, international market and globalization at Procore Technologies.
In Silicon Valley, Navarro explained, less than 30% of the workforce are women, but they are in communication, legal or secretarial positions. “In the technical teams that develop innovations, that is, they are responsible for defining the technology that we will all consume, 96% are men.”
Navarro, who is, according to Analytics Insight magazine, the most influential woman in the world in the field of technology, confessed that “every day” she encounters difficulties because she is a woman.
Yolanda Lupiáñez, a computer engineer from the UAB, was also surprised by the change that her coworkers experienced when she became a mother, excluding her from different activities. An expert in digital transformation applied in the field of health (she created computer applications on covid for the Generalitat), she is now the CEO of her own start-up, Myllox, made up mostly of women and with special sensitivity towards needs of her.
For her part, Elisenda Bou-Balust valued the fact that she was able to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) one summer when, at the age of 19, she was studying telecommunications. He traveled thanks to a scholarship awarded by the UPC and at MIT he discovered that “he was one of the guys” and that recognition of the UPC training as well as the awareness of his own worth led him to develop a successful career (he sold a company to Apple and collaborated with NASA). Today she is an expert in artificial intelligence, software architecture and autonomous learning systems and works for Apple in Barcelona.
