Mairal Usón, Ricardo

Ricardo Mairal has been Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of Foreign Language Philology at the UNED (Spain's National Distance Learning University) since 2002. After achieving his PhD from the University of Zaragoza he taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid for four years before moving to the UNED. Throughout his career his teaching work has centred around semantics, lexicology, syntax and linguistic theory. He has also been a guest professor on various PhD programmes at other universities (Cordoba, La Laguna, Castilla-La Mancha, Autonomous University of Madrid, Valencia, La Rioja, Valencia Polytechnic, Autonomous University of Mexico, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, etc.) and foundations, including the PhD programme in Linguistics at the Ortega y Gasset Research Institute.

He is the co-author and co-editor of six books published by prestigious publishing houses including Ariel (1999), a work awarded the National Prize for Research into English Linguistics AEDEAN 1999, Mouton de Gruyter (1999), Mouton de Gruyter (2002), Cambridge University Press (2003, 2006) and Akal (2012). He has also published more than 50 scientific articles in national and international journals. Ricardo Mairal has spoken at several conferences on applied linguistics and linguistic theory (AESLA, AEDEAN, AELCO, International Role and Reference Grammar Conference, Functional Grammar Conference, Argentine Linguistic Society, CRAL, Sylex I, Terminology and Artificial Intelligence (TIA), etc.). He has delivered talks in Germany, Argentina, Chile, the USA, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Beijing, Taiwan and other locations and has directed and taken part in more than ten publicly-funded research projects on the language industry and computational linguistics (http://www.seconds.edu.es/es/rmairal). He co-founded the LEXICOM research group (www.lexicom.es), which brings together a significant number of researchers from diverse national and international institutions. Mairal recently worked on the design of a multifunctional and multilingual knowledge base (www.fungramkb.com) for developing natural language processing and neurolinguistic applications, focussing on the clinical aspects of these.

Mairal was President of the Spanish Applied Linguistics Association (2011-2017), Director of the ACTUALing Consolidated Research Group (2006-2011), Director of the Department of Foreign Language Philology and Linguistics (1998-2000; 2011-2013), Director of Spain’s University for Distance Language Learning (2000-2004), Deputy Rector of Research and Second Deputy Rector at the UNED (2013-2016) and subsequently Deputy Rector of Teaching and Planning and First Deputy Rector at the UNED (2016-2018).