José Antonio Mayoral Murillo was elected president of UNITA - Universitas Montium, a position he will hold for the next year. The choice of the Rector of the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) as "chairman" of the consortium was one of the decisions of the Governance Board (GB) meeting held at the Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI), one of the six founding academies of the project.
The meeting brought together all the rectors of the UNITA academies - UBI, Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), Université de Pau et des Pays de L'Adour and Université Savoie Mont Blanc (France), Università Degli Studi di Torino (Italy) and the Universitatea de Veste din Timisoara (Romania) - and was the culmination of three days of meetings of various bodies of the consortium.
The Universitas Montium meetings served to take stock of the activities carried out during the first year of existence of this partnership, celebrated on 6 November, and to plan for a year that is expected to be "crucial", as José Antonio Mayoral Murillo defined it: "We will try to obtain more funds from the European Union, to increase the alliance to new universities".
Among the new partners are the Public University of Navarra (Spain) and the Polytechnic Institute of Guarda, which already attended the Covilhã event, and also the Transylvania University of Brasov (Romania) and Brescia University (Italy), which participated via teleconference.
At the Governance Board meeting, the consolidation of the UNITA project was on the table, as well as the move towards new forms of cooperation, with the purpose of investing in the development of the territories covered by the network. In this particular, it is intended to create a platform that promotes cooperation between entrepreneurs.
"If we bring together the ideas that come from the six universities, we can create very strong alliances and use this joint talent to create wealth in the territories," said UNITA's new charmain.
An intention to which the host university can make a strong contribution. "We have many years of experience in the area of entrepreneurship and our partners were surprised by our capacity, after the visits they made to our academy," said Mário Raposo, Rector of UBI.
Another idea under study in the GB was the creation of a European association of economic interest, to give more formal weight to Universitas Montium, near the European Union.
The GB meeting finalized the set of UNITA events that began on November 24th and included the Management Committee Re-UNITA (Research UNITA), Quality Evaluation Board and the Students Assembly.