For yet another year, the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) has held its traditional speech of the director, in which Jaime García del Barrio has reviewed some achievements of the 2018-2019 course and has anticipated the lines that will mark this academic year and the following ones. Pablo Pérez, who joined the board last September as scientific co-director, also spoke.

Firstly, Jaime García del Barrio acknowledged the efforts of the projects to increase the issue number of articles published in the highest quality specialized journals: "Over the last few years we have managed to ensure that more than half of our papers appear in journals in the first quartile. If we add the first two quartiles, the figure rises to more than 80%". 

Along with this, he recalled some of the most important academic activities of the course, such as the VI ICS Lecture on Humanities and Social Sciences, given by Rafael Yuste, ideologist of project BRAIN; the investiture honorary doctor to the British sociologist Margaret Archer, professor of the Master's Degree in research in Social Sciences; or the organization of the I laboratory Social Citizen, in partnership with the high school of research Advanced Social (I-COMMUNITAS) of the Public University of Navarra and the high school of Sociology and Political Science of Navarra. On the other hand, he stressed that ICS researchers have attended more than 100 scientific activities in 28 countries on several continents.

Another milestone of the 2018-2019 academic year has been the launch of the Master's Degree Universitario en Big Data Science and its accreditation by the National Agency for Assessment of Quality and Accreditation. The program has been inaugurated in October 2019 with 25 students coming from companies such as Google, Telefónica, Ferrovial, PwC and Hewlett Packard, among others. The degree scroll joins the other one coordinated by ICS since 2016, the Master's Degree at research in Social Sciences, whose III promotion has been formed by students from three countries and seven different universities.

The director of high school also emphasized the importance of attracting public and private competitive resources, as well as other institutional aid. With respect to the former, he pointed out that funds from competitive calls accounted for 20.3% of the annual budget . These include grants from the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation; the Marie Curie program of the European Commission; the Ramón Areces Foundation; the Spanish Government, through calls from different ministries such as the Ramón y Cajal or the Juan de la Cierva. As for institutional grants, they contributed 35% of the ICS's budget .

The director of the ICS, Jaime García del Barrio, reviewed some of the milestones of the previous year.
Photo: Natalia Rouzaut

The 2018-2019 academic year also saw the first assessment 360º of the ICS. It ran to position of an internal evaluator committee , composed of ten people from the center, and of an external evaluator committee , in which participated Paul James, director of the Institute for Culture and Society of the Western Sydney University (Australia); Christel Fricke, scientific director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature of the University of Oslo (Norway); Lluis Rovira, director general de Centres de Recerca de Catalunya (CERCA); Ángel José Gómez-Montoro, director of Campus Madrid of the University of Navarra; and Hanne Roothoft, researcher at the Public University of Navarra, who served as administrative assistant.

Jaime García del Barrio explained that in the current academic year, which coincides with the tenth anniversary of the center, the recommendations of the assessment process will begin to be implemented. He said that one of the main challenges is to "continue advancing along the path of research excellence", which necessarily involves "achieving greater unity as a center". He detailed that this will be promoted through the search for areas of convergence, the communication of priorities of the five-year strategic plan and the elaboration of plans for work that will promote close partnership in the high school team.

For his part, Pablo Perez explained that the three themes toward which the different lines will converge and which will facilitate the connection between the current projects will be the following: 'Being human' (Be human), which will try to deepen the idea of what human reality consists of beyond the concepts of mechanistic biologicism; 'Hispanic world. Identity and challenges'; and 'Europe, a common project . Europe and freedoms'.