Anna Ramon, Vice-rector of Teaching Staff at the UVic-UCC, and Paola Galbany, new dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Welfare

On Thursday, at the proposal of the Rector, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees of the Balmes University Foundation Balmes (FUBalmes) approved the creation of the new Office of the Vice-rector for Teaching Staff at the UVic-UCC. The post will be held by Dr Anna Ramon, lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Welfare (FHSW), whose appointment was also approved by the Board on Thursday, when it also appointed Paola Galbany as dean of the FHSW. The new dean takes up the position that Mireia Subirana vacated in January, to focus on her role as Director of Care for the Hospital Consortium of Vic. 

The exponential growth that research at the UVic-UCC has experienced in recent years, in terms of both the volume of output and the profile of the research groups, as well as the new challenges posed by the imminent recruitment of teaching staff for the Faculty of Medicine and the integration of academic teaching staff from Umanresa, have led the rector to take the decision to separate these two areas. They were previously within the same vice-rector's office, headed by Dr. Jordi Villà, who now becomes Vice-rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer. Anna Ramon will now be responsible for proposing and coordinating policy on teaching staff, developing and encouraging the careers of the institution's teaching and research staff, while working closely with the faculties and departments. Another of her responsibilities will be to direct and oversee the management of teaching staff, in coordination with the Office of the Vice-rector for Academic Affairs and the Talent Management Area.

Anna Ramon – a sociologist, teacher and researcher

Anna Ramon holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Barcelona, as well as a master's degree in University Education for Novice Teachers and a Diploma in Advanced Sociology Studies. She is currently lead researcher in the projects "Individual religious symbols in the workplace: the case of the use of the hijab in health centres in Catalonia" within the framework of the Relig 2016 funding from the Catalan Government's Ministry of Governance and Institutional Relations; "Analysis and dynamics of social networks of the sectors involved in the prevention of alcohol consumption in Catalonia", funded by the Public Health Agency; and "Evaluating Cannabis: analysing social change in the practices and perceptions of cannabis," funded by the Government of Catalonia's Subdirectorate General on Drug Dependence.

Ramon has supervised four doctoral theses and undertaken two research stays, as a pre-doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona (USA), where she produced her doctoral thesis on "The structure and dynamics of social capital in Europe" and another at Harvard University (USA). The new vice-rector began teaching at the University of Barcelona in 2006-07, ​​and has also taught at the Open University of Catalonia. In 2013 she joined the teaching staff at the UVic-UCC, and she has been director of the Department of Social Sciences and Welfare of the FHSW since 2015.

Paola Galbany - a doctor in Nursing and an anthropologist

The new Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Welfare, Paola Galbany, holds a doctorate in Nursing Sciences and a degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona, as well as a diploma in Nursing from the Universitat Ramon Llull. Over the last seven years, she has worked as a lecturer in the Department of Nursing of the Faculty of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), and previously taught at the URL Blanquerna and the UB's School of Nursing at Bellvitge. She has also taught on the master's degree course in Innovation and Research in Nursing Care at the UAB, and has undertaken a teaching innovation project on clinical simulation with the maximum levels of realism. 

Her scientific career has focused on studying of the evolution of care and thought in nursing, as well as the methodological foundations of nursing. She is a member of the FEBE, a group working on research and teaching of the history of nursing, and of the interdisciplinary, inter-university and international research group AFIN, which focuses on basic and applied research in the social sciences, humanities and health sciences. In 2015 and 2016 she undertook a 12-month stay at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto (Canada), with a postdoctoral fellowship, which led her to establish a research line on migrations of Spanish nurses as a result of the economic crisis which began in 2008. Galbany has also worked at various hospitals in the Barcelona metropolitan area as a care nurse, as well as at the Hospital de l'Ouest Parisien in France.