The University of La Laguna will award the honorary doctorate to the jurist Pedro Valentín de Pablo Contreras, the art curator Serge Fauchereau and, posthumously, to the molecular biologist Margarita Salas Falgueras.
The delivery of one of the greatest distinctions in the academic field will take place next Thursday in the Auditorium of the teaching and research institution, the University of La Laguna reported this Friday.
The granting of these honorary distinctions was approved by the Governing Council of the institution on October 28, 2019, but the delivery ceremony has been delayed as a result of the pandemic.
Due to this delay, the distinction to Margarita Salas Falgueras will be posthumous because the teacher has died during that period.
The act will be opened by the rector of the University of La Laguna, Rosa Aguilar Chinea, and then the general secretary, Elvira Afonso Rodríguez, will read the concession agreement approved at the time.
The professor of Civil Law Elena Sánchez Jordán and the professor of Art History María Isabel Navarro Segura will take the podium to read the laudatios of Pedro Valentín de Pablo Contreras and Serge Faucherau, respectively.
After the words of praise, the honorees will be the next to go up on stage to be formally sworn in by the rector and then read their entrance speeches and pronounce the oath of incorporation into the Cloister of the University of La Laguna.
Subsequently, the professor of physiology Teresa Giráldez Fernández will perform the laudatio corresponding to professor Margarita Salas Falguera, who will be invested posthumously.
The last part of the ceremony will feature a musical performance by the flutist Ayoze Tornero Hernández, and the rector will deliver a welcome speech to the new doctors, after which the act will end with the university anthem “Gaudeamus Igitur”.
Pedro Valentín de Pablo Contreras obtained his chair in 1991 at the University of La Laguna, a center to which he has always been linked, and where “he awakened the vocations of students and teachers, taught us to be interested in the historical origin of legal disciplines”, Professor Sánchez Jordán explained when she defended her candidacy before the Governing Council.
Author of a six-volume manual on civil law, which is now in its sixth edition and is widely recognized in twenty universities, De Pablo Contreras is also the author of more than twenty books, specializing in family law and real rights .
The art curator Serge Fauchereau has a distinguished career as a curator, university professor in New York and Austin, and also an expert in Latin American art.
He was responsible for a set of exhibitions that for ten years opened the most important stage of the Pompidou art center, to once again recall the avant-garde cultures of the 20th century in exhibitions such as Paris-New York, Paris-Moscow or Italian Futurism, where the exile of great artists who fled from European totalitarianism was reflected, said the professor at the University of La Laguna.
Fauchereau has maintained a continuous relationship with great Spanish museums, and in the case of Tenerife, he maintains regular contact with artists such as Luis Palmero or Martín Chirino.
Margarita Salas, who is considered the mother of molecular biology in Spain, after a postdoctoral period in New York with Severo Ochoa, returned to Spain where her work has not ceased to be recognized.
Awarded by Nature as a mentor for researchers, Salas is honorary from a dozen Spanish universities, as well as a tenured academic from several academies.
Margarita Salas’ curriculum vitae has more than three hundred and fifty publications in international magazines or books and about ten in national media, and she was also the holder of eight patents.
