Date of appointment: 26 september 2000.
By proposal of: Organizational Comission V Centuries.
Date of investiture: 31 may 2001.
Sponsor: Dr. Ramón Lapiedra Civera and Dr. Ernest García.
Castells was born in Barcelona, but he has significant links with the city of Valencia, where his paternal family comes from. In fact, he liven in Valencia for four years, during his college student age. This sociologist is author of an indispensable trilogy, named La era de la información: Economía, Sociedad y Cultura (Information age: Economics, Society and Culture).
Manuel Castells is full university professor in the Californian University of Berkeley, where he manages the Studies Center of the Occidental Europe. He has also been full professor of Sociology in the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he founded the University Institute of Sociology for the New Technologies. As he said, he has always been a university student. From the sixties he bagan to research in the École Pratique des Hautes Études in París. Afterwards he did stays in so diverse and far centres as Montreal, Singapur, Xile, Oxford or Pretoria.
