Dr Valeria Ramirez

Valeria is a Research Associate at the University Commercialisation and Innovation (UCI) Policy Evidence Unit. Her research lies at the intersection of innovations and society, examining how communities of practice create, use, adopt and adapt new technologies. She specialises in performance metrics, evaluation, and quantification. Her doctoral research explored the measurement practices among communication professionals. Through the prism of science and technology studies, she showed the rise of evaluation concerns driven by the availability of digital scoring and tracking devices, described the methods employed to balance personal savoir-faire and objective assessment and identified the strategies implemented to agree on impact metrics and evaluation frameworks. She is currently working in the future of university Knowledge Exchange (KE) data, metrics and performance measurement.

Prior to joining the UCI, Valeria was part of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS) in Paris; senior lecturer of Digital Cultures at SciencePo (Medialab), and course leader at UGE from 2015 to 2023.

With over 15 years of consulting experience in Mexico, Spain, and France, Valeria has provided communication strategy and crisis management expertise to financial, legal, and pharmaceutical sectors. She has also advised research institutes including the French Ministry of Education and Research, The National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information and the Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, as well as university spinoffs such as Ynsect and Afyren.

Having started as a practitioner before embarking on research, Valeria is committed to the societal and economic impact of research. She leveraged her own findings to assist The French Agency for Ecological Transition in their implementation of KPIs and evaluation framework for communication performance. Furthermore, she co-founded the Association for Academic Consultants (CCC) in Paris to support Knowledge Exchange practices in social sciences and designed innovative training methodologies to develop impactful research projects for the ESCR SCDTP. She initiated the Franco-Mexican Frugal Innovation research group and contributes to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Virtual Learning Centre course on enabling sustainable and local food systems.

Valeria holds a PhD in Sociology and a MSc in Information and Communication Technologies from the University Gustave Eiffel, in France; a MSc in Economics from the University Complutense of Madrid and a MSc in Journalism from the European University of Madrid, in Spain, and a Bachelor degree in Communication Sciences, from the Universidad del Valle de Mexico.