TEC de Monterrey has appointed new leaders for the PASCAL Centre. In a recent communication from Dean Alejandro Poiré, campus-wide dean for social science, to PASCAL Chair Josef Konvitz, Dean Poiré announced the appointment of Professor Ana Lucia Hill Mayoral as Director, together with Dean Paula Campos Villaseñor as the PASCAL team.

Prof. Ana Lucia Hill has extensive experience in the federal government as well as in higher education before joining the faculty at the School of Social Sciences and Government at the Santa Fe campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City.

TEC de Monterrey, part of the U21 network together with the University of Glasgow and the University of Johannesburg which also host PASCAL centres, is a multi-campus system with two campuses in the greater Mexico City. The older, main campus suffered some damage in the most recent earthquake; the Santa Fe campus was created away from the city centre after the 1985 earthquake.

Prof. Ana Lucia Hill’s senior government experience was in civil protection, and she now heads the Centre for Resilience and Disasters at the Santa Fe campus. She can be reached at [email protected].  

In my capacity as Research Associate for Resilience at the New Cities Foundation, I can say personally that  Prof. Hill’s portfolio of responsibilities is especially welcome. All our cities must become better learning cities if the lessons of past disasters and contemporary risk analysis are to make our cities more sustainable. We have already begun reflecting about a set of projects that will demonstrate what PASCAL can bring to Mexico and indeed to Central and South America, and what we all have to learn from their experience, especially in such fields as volunteering and social entrepreneurship.