Representation at world level

The International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) is an international non-profit association of 59 engineering education organisations and federations, in addition to 13 multinational companies such as Airbus, Boeing, Siemens, Coursera and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). All are involved in teaching, dissemination, accreditation and research in one or more branches of engineering, broadly defined. To give a few examples, the member organisations represent as many countries from the five continents, including the United States, China, India, Australia and the United Kingdom.

These data allow us to understand the relevance and dimension of the recent election of the Academic Staff of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Luis Manuel Sánchez Ruiz, as President-Elect of this organisation, created in Brazil in 2006. He assumed the post on 27 October during the IFEES General Assembly in Monterrey, Mexico, in front of hundreds of participants and colleagues.

Peace engineering

Sánchez Ruiz becomes the tenth president of IFEES and faces a four-year mandate in which he will face challenges as profound and topical as the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to higher education in engineering or the dissemination of peace engineering. This project has been developed by IFEES to ensure that prosperity in the world goes hand in hand with "sustainability, social equity, entrepreneurship, transparency, community commitment, ethics and the consolidation of a culture of quality", according to the UPV full professor.

In the same way, Sánchez Ruiz argues that the organisation should maintain its role as a catalyst for links between the different institutions around the world that make it up. "We must continue working to make IFEES the global voice of engineering education, seeking to harmonise proposals for the general improvement of engineering education without neglecting local attention to specific situations," he says.

Career

Before his appointment, Luis Manuel Sánchez Ruiz served as Vice President of the Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) - from 2015 to the present. At the same time, he was a member of the IFEES Executive Committee for five years. More specifically, in SEFI, he was the co-director of the European Convention of Deans of Engineering and chairman of the Risk and Audit Committee, among others.

Regarding his career as a lecturer and researcher, he has so far written more than a dozen texts for engineering education and a hundred articles in various fields of engineering, ranging from functional analysis to engineering education.