Juan Luis Gandía, has become the first professor of the Faculty of Economics to be appointed Principal of the Universitat de València, and the first from the Tarongers Campus - which opened three decades ago, in 1995, when the Faculty of Economics moved there. The last one is the result of the union of the former faculties of Economics and Business and the University School of Business, which were previously located on the Blasco Ibáñez campus.

Born in Ontinyent in 1965, spent his childhood and adolescence there until, with the help of the scholarship from the Ministry of Education, he moved first to Zaragoza and then to Valencia to pursue his university studies. He is a professor of Financial Economics and Accounting of the Faculty of Economics and holds a Bachelor Degree and Ph.D. in Economics and Business Administration from the Universitat de València, having received an outstanding academic award. Throughout his more than thirty-four years of service to the university, he has constantly been actively involved in the core activities that define an academic´s career taking on leaderships roles and assuming responsibilities in teaching, research and knowledge transfer as well as in the university administration. In all this areas, he has maintained an innovative approach focused on academic excellence, which has enabled him to acquire and extensive professional experience and deep understanding of university administration and various academic activities. In the field of teaching, since joining the Department of Accounting at the UV, he has thought courses in various undergraduate and graduate programs within the Faculty of Economics. He also had led various educational projects and heads a well-established teaching innovative groups. He has been recognized for six five-year periods of teaching service.

Research

His research has focused primarily on the analysis the impact of the new technologies in the transparency and reliability of corporate information, the relationship between financial auditing and the quality of financial information, and the textual analysis of the non-financial information and its economic effects. He is the head of several research lines groupes under the acronym META (Management Reporting, Transparency, Accounting Education, and Reliability of Financial Information), listed in the Registry of Research Structures. He has managed and participated in different projects of competitive research grants, carrying out knowledge-sharing initiatives with public and private entities. He is the author of the numerous articles in indexed journals (WOS, SCOPUS) and of various research monographs for institutes such as the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (IVIE), the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), and the Spanish Association of Accounting and Business Administration (AECA). He has been recognized for five six-year periods of research and one six-year period of knowledge transfer and innovation. In the professional sphere, during 2013-2021, and representing Other Entities Representing Collective Interests (Otras Entidades Representativas de Intereses Colectivos), he was General Counsel of the Caixa Ontinyent. During the same period, he was Member of the Board of Directors and Member of its Executive and Management Committee. From 2017 to 2021, he was Member of the Investment Committee from that same financial institution.He was also a member of the Board of Directors of The Spanish Association of University Accounting Professors (ASEPUC) for four years, and from 2001 he has been a founding member of the Committee on New Technologies and Accounting of the Spanish Association of Accounting and Business Administration (AECA).

University administration

As for his involvement in university administration, he served as Director of the Accounting Department (2009-2012), Member of the Statutes Committee (2009-2013), Member of the Curriculum Development Committee for the Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Management and of the Curriculum Development Committee for the Official Master’s Degree in Accounting, Auditing, and Management Control; Rector’s Representative for the Management of the EDEM University Center (2012-2014), Vice-rector of Finance, Infrastructure and Technology of the Information (2014-2018) and Vice-rector of Finance, Infrastructure (2018-2019). From 2022 he has been a Coordinator of the Doctoral Program in Accounting and Corporate Finance. He has also been elected to serve on various university representative boards, having been a member of the Faculty Senate without interruption since 2009 and having previously served on the Departmental Board of the School of Economics.