Elisa Sayrol received the engineering degree and the doctoral degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona Tech, in 1989 and 1994, respectively.
From 1990 to 1991 she was a graduate student at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA and from 1991 to 1993 she was a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA where she worked towards the PhD with Professor C.L. Nikias.
She received the 1994-1995 special award of doctoral studies in Telecommunications Engineering from UPC.
She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at UPC and belongs to the research group on image and video processing. She teaches undergraduate courses in Signals and Systems and graduate courses in Digital Image Processing.
Her research interests include robust and higher-order statistics, image and video analysis as well as image and video watermarking. She has published over 30 articles in these areas and has participated in several national and European research projects. She was a member of the organizing committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Conference/ATHOS Workshop on Higher-Order Statistics in 1995 and the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in 2003.
In 2004-2005 she launched and coordinated the Master of Science in Communication and Information Technologies, belonging to the pilot programs of the Catalan Government, that was pioneer in the adaptation to the European Higher Education Area in Spain, as well as being taught completely in English.
She was Associate Dean for International Relations at the School of Telecommunications Engineering of Barcelona (Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria de Telecomunicació de Barcelona, ETSETB-UPC) at UPC between 2001 and 2006. Under this position, she established numerous double degree agreements and exchanges with universities around the world (Europe, US, South-America), and opened the first agreements with Chinese Universities at UPC. She also established pioneer agreements with companies around Europe (specially in France, Germany, Italy, UK, The Netherlands) to allow last-year engineering students to carry out their final degree thesis in companies.
From April 2006 until April 2012 she was the Dean of the ETSETB-UPC. As Dean, she was responsible for carrying out a thorough reform to adapt traditional Engineering Curricula to the European Higher Education Area. Thus, current study plans were set up during her mandate. She is a member of the Southern/Middle CDIO (Conceive Design Implement Operate) Europe Group, a worldwide initiative to train the next generation of engineers, that has adopted the ETSETB-UPC in its new curricula. The participation of the ETSETB-UPC in the CDIO Initiative has been recognized both by the Catalan Government with the Prize Jaume Vicens Vives for University Education Quality in 2012, as well as by the CDIO Council designating UPC as organizer of its annual international conference in 2014.
From September 2012 to December 2013 she was Vice-Rector for Institutional Relationships at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. During that period, she was responsible for different tasks. On one side, the Second Equal Opportunities Plan (2013-2015) was completed and the deployment of the first year was carried out during her mandate. She was responsible of the UPC Alumni organization to boost relationships with graduates from UPC, particularly she launched a job offer platform including all schools at UPC to facilitate employability of graduates and to make it easier for companies to find young and senior graduates. As a Vicerector the most demanding task was to deal with Corporate Relations between the University and local companies. She was responsible to define the UPC Business Portal, a unique entry point to facilitate to industrial partners finding the appropriate information and the contact of experts. She created the UPC Business Council and the UPC Business Circle. Two different institutional instruments to foster all aspects of University-Business relations and to generate debate on specific research projects, strategic research areas and other key topics. She was also responsible for University-Company Chair Policies. She launched a pilot program of crowdfunding for university projects. She was also the representative of UPC for the Barcelona Mobile World Capital Foundation.
After many years in managing positions at UPC she’s currently back to her academic position although she collaborates with several institutions:
She is a member du Conseil d'Administration de l'École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées ENSTA ParisTech.
She collaborates with the Spanish National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA), within the so called MECES comission.
She is the secretary of the Engineering and Architecture Comission for the University Evaluation and Accreditation Unit at the Knowledge Agency of Andalucia.
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