Nature and objectives

The endowed chair is established by a one-time gift to the university from a corporation or individual, in this case Iberdrola. The funds are placed in a trust or endowment, and a portion of the annual income from the trust is used in partial support of the professorship. The remainder of the annual income is re-invested so that the endowment will continue to grow and keep pace with inflation, thus ensuring that the endowed chair will continue in perpetuity. In the particular case of the Prince of Asturias Chair the endowment funds the presence at  the University of New Mexico (UNM) of the Chair holder for one semester a year. In addition to this, UNM augments the Endowed Chair by funding three graduate assistantships at any one time. These graduate assistantships are named for Iberdrola and are for Spanish students. These graduate assistantships provide tuition scholarships and stipends for students conducting research in the context of the Chair as an integral part of their education for masters’ or doctoral degrees.

The Prince of Asturias Chair was born with a first fundamental objective of establishing a program of excellence in researchand doctoral education in concrete areas of great practical relevance within the fields of Information Science and Related Technologies, so that, in the realm of this program, and through the participation in it of researchers from Spain, it can contribute in a significant way to the education of the next generation of Spanish researchers in the area.

The other fundamental objective of the Chair is to serve as a catalyst for joint activities between the University of New Mexico, Iberdrola, and the  Spanish universities and research institutions, both at the academic and industrial levels, within the area of Information and Communication Technologies. To this end, in addition to the visits from Spanish researchers to UNM (and researchers from UNM to Spain), the Chair can connect institutions and promote bilateral agreements between them to foster institutional personnel exchanges, joint activities, university-industry collaborations, etc.

<p text-align:="" justify;"=""> In addition to these fundamental objectives, it is also a purpose of the Chair to contribute to the wider dissemination, not only of the achievements of the Chair, but also of the nature and importance of the research advances worldwide in the area of Information  and Communication Technologies i.e., to provide information on the science and engineering that is behind the computing and communications world, which, despite being pervasive in our everyday lives and having a continuous impact on our activities, are great strangers to society at large.