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ECE Welcomes Prince of Asturias Chair

October 5, 2009

ECE@UNM proudly welcomes Dr. Fernando Pérez-González to its faculty this fall in the position of the Prince of Asturias Endowed Chair in Information Science and Related Technologies.

Today, in fact, Dr. Pérez-González is joining an exclusive group that is welcoming their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Asturias to the UNM campus. This is the couple's third visit here since 2000, when the chair was established, and they will meet with the advisory council for the Prince of Asturias Endowed Chair before traveling a bit further north to help commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe.

Accompanying the prince and princess will be Spain's Ambassador to the United States Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo, the former U.S. Ambassador to Spain Edward Romero, and officials from the Spanish ministries of Foreign Affairs and Science and Innovation. The visitors will be hosted by UNM President Schmidly. To read the UNM Today story, go here.

Created in honor of the heir to the Spanish throne, the Prince of Asturias Endowed Chair promotes collaboration between Spanish and U.S. scholars by bringing a preeminent Spanish scientist to the University of New Mexico to engage in teaching and research in information science and technology. The chair is funded by Spain's electric utility, Iberdrola, the fourth largest electric utility in the world, and was created at the initiative of former U.S. Ambassador to Spain Edward Romero to advance the state of knowledge in a number of areas within the information science and technology field.

ECE@UNM complements the Chair endowment with support for three Spanish graduate students to study with the Chair and ECE faculty at UNM.

Dr. Pérez-González will be in residence at ECE@UNM each fall semester of his tenure, from three to five years, teaching a graduate-level course in addition to pursuing local collaborations and research. This semester he is teaching Information Forensics and Security, ECE 595-007.

Pérez-González also continues the three positions he has held while at Spain’s Universidad de Vigo. These positions are: executive director of the Galician R&D Center in Telecommunications, manager of the National R&D Plan for the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and professor of Communication Technologies.

Pérez-González studied and collaborated at ECE@UNM in 1991,1992 and 2006. ECE Professor and Chair Chaouki Abdallah served as one of his advisors for the doctoral degree he earned at the Universidad de Vigo in 1993.

His research interests are in digital communications, adaptive algorithms, robust control, digital watermarking and information security. He has co-authored six books and has 154 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and reviewed conference papers to his credit. Pérez-González also co-holds five communications related patents and is a senior member of the IEEE and its Signal Processing Society.