In his professional career, Pedro Sigaud has combined several international experiences in the fields of university management, teaching and research, focusing specifically on digital technologies and the media. His current research deals with leadership and entrepreneurship in the creative industries, with an emphasis on the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf countries.
Pedro Sigaud has worked as vice dean and director of the Master’s Degree in Leadership and Innovation in Media at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School for Communication (reference communication school in the Gulf region, founded in partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Cinematic Arts, both at USC in Los Angeles), of the American University in Dubai. He is also a member of the consulting team for Harvard Business Publishing Education Research and the Dubai Future Council on Media. He has designed postgraduate programmes in different countries and has collaborated in different teaching projects for foreign universities.
In taking on this position, the new dean sees it as a challenge of expanding the Faculty of Communication Sciences: “One of the main strategic objectives is its consolidation from a research point of view, but also in transfer to industry, to the professional world,” he pointed out.
For this reason, he went on to explain, “a profound understanding of new technologies and their application in the media world, especially artificial intelligence, is needed. Our students must have a profile that allows them to work in any traditional medium, but we must also encourage them to have entrepreneurial capacity so that in the future they are able to propose innovative solutions to the challenges that arise in the communication field.”
To this end, Sigaud Sellos is committed to internationalisation and the expansion of the studies offered. “Another objective would be to establish more strategic agreements with foreign institutions and universities and expand our offer of master’s and postgraduate programmes,” he explained.
The dean emphasised the importance of the task of training the future professionals. “The role we have carries the heavy responsibility,” he emphasised, “to train our students well, so that they have a positive impact on society. Communication and media are great influencers of opinions, trends and behaviours. Our ideas and attitudes, contrary to what we believe, don’t originate in ourselves, but are mostly based on the models we see and hear, and very often, more than we even realise, these models come from the media. It’s not by chance that we say that the press and the media are the ‘fourth power’.”
Among other things, the new dean pointed out the Faculty’s recently opened and “highest quality” facilities, and commented that “the Transmedia Lab, for example, is designed so that students can innovate and experiment with the production of new products and multimedia formats.
