Created in 1987 by the Parliament of Navarre, the Public University of Navarre (UPNA) is a relatively small public university in the north of Spain, with campuses in Pamplona and Tudela. Academically, it focuses on Humanities, Social Sciences, Law, Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Health Sciences. Its degrees in Education comprise one of the largest bodies of students. It is one of Spain’s leading universities in terms of teaching, research and transfer, occupying, along with 16 other Spanish public universities, the upper quartile when it comes to overall productivity (2017 ISSUE ranking, BBVA-IVIE). UPNA offers 25 bachelor degrees and 26 master programmes, with 6961 and 766 students respectively.

The teaching and research staff is organised around 6 research institutes with more than 270 researchers: the Institute for Advanced Social Research (ICommunitas), the Institute of Smart Cities (ISC), the Institute for Advanced Materials (InaMat), the Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics (Inarbe), the Institute for Innovation and Sustainable Development in Food Chain (IS-Food), and the Institute for Multidisciplinary Applied Biology Research (IMAB). The university is also part of Navarrabiomed (joint centre with the Government of Navarre’s Department of Health).

Regarding internationalisation, UPNA has signed agreements with over 300 universities in 50 countries. In the course 2018/19, UPNA managed 750 student mobility exchanges: 430 out-coming and 320 incoming students. With these figures, UPNA meets the strategic objective of sending abroad more than 25% of its graduates. As for Erasmus+ projects, UPNA has been a member or coordinator of 7 KA2 strategic partnerships, 3 KA2 capacity building projects, 1 KA1 Jean Monnet, 1 Sport Action and 1 KA2 Knowledge Alliance. And UPNA is one of the most successful applicants to the KA107 program in Spain with 367.556€ assigned in the last call.

The Doctoral School of the UPNA offers 15 Doctoral Programmes and 65 Ph.D students have been awarded a doctoral degree on average since 2013. In the academic year 2018/19, 395 students, 20.4% international, were enrolled in the Doctoral School. In 5 years, since its creation, the school has increased the number of international students from 9% to 20%.

Monica Aznárez

Monica Aznárez holds a PhD in Spanish Linguistics and is an Associate Professor at the Public University of Navarre (Spain). She teaches different courses on Language Teaching Methodology in the Primary Education Bachelor’s Degree and in the Secondary Education Master’s Degree. She has worked as a lecturer at different universities in the US, Peru and Australia. These international experiences have greatly helped her become a better teacher and grow as a professional. Her research interests include language teaching at the Primary and Secondary levels, particularly the teaching and learning of writing skills in L1 and L2.

M. Camino Bueno Alastuey

M. Camino Bueno Alastuey holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics and is a Full Professor at the Public University of Navarre, where she has been teaching English for Primary Teachers and Using ICT to Teach Foreign Languages in the Primary and Early Childhood Education Bachelor Degree and the Master for Secondary Education for the past 20 years.  Her research interests include telecollaboration, collaborative L2 writing and computer assisted language learning, especially effective course design with new technological tools and the effect of technology on oral and written skills development. She is also interested in teacher training and in how to develop foreign language teachers´ digital teaching skills. She has published nationally and internationally on those topics. 

Jesús Lasheras

Jesús Lasheras Balduz is an assistant teacher in the Dept. of Human Sciences and Education and an assistant researcher in I-Communitas, Institute for Advanced Social Research, at the Public University of Navarre. His current professional teaching career focuses on Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applied to TEFL in the BA programmes in Early Childhood and Primary Education. He has also worked as an international academic coordinator aiming at promoting Education students and teachers’ international mobility and searching for new partner universities. His primary research interests include the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and TEFL, with an emphasis on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), motivation towards the learning of English in bilingual programmes and the effect of ICT tools on TEFL.

Unai Pérez-Goya

Unai Pérez-Goya holds a PhD and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, Informatics, and Mathematics at the Public University of Navarre, where he has been teaching since 2020. He holds a PhD in Industrial Sciences and Technologies from the Public University of Navarre (2019), a Master’s degree in Innovation and Research in Informatics with a specialization in Distributed Systems from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (2015), and a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering from Mondragon University (2012).

He is part of the Spatial Statistics research group and is a research trainee at the Institute for Advanced Materials (INAMAT). Since 2015, he has worked on various research projects as a project assistant and served as an associate professor from 2016 to 2025.