Emilio Fernández Peña
Director of the Sport Research Institute
Dr. Emilio Fernández Peña has been Professor of Communication and director of the Centre d’Estudis Olímpics i de l’Esport at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona since 2009. He is currently directing The Olympic Games and the Media MOOC course on the Coursera platform, which has so far more than 13,000 students enrolled from 143 different countries. He is the main researcher of the project Social Networks and Soccer: Violence, Public Participation, and the Ecology of Communication funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spanish Research Foundation) (2016-2019). Dr Fernández is the founding director of the Sport Communication Lab; a research centre created by the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona and Barcelona Football Club and is, in turn, director of the Master in Communication Management and Sponsorship in Sporting Organizations. He has been advisor to and was responsible for part of the permanent exhibition on television in the new Olympic Museum, 2014, of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Specifically related to social media, Dr Fernández Peña is the creator of the Social Media and Global Sport Observatory, a platform for the analysis of strategies and flow of content publication of the major competitions, teams, and athletes in global sport (http://www.socialmediasport.org/). He has also been guest professor or lecturer at the University of Southern California (Annemberg School for Communication), University of Athens, University of Beijing, Université de Paris 3, Universidade Gama Filho y Pontificia, Universidade Católica de Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), International Russian Olympic University, Universidad de Bolonia, and the International Olympic Academy (Greece), among others. Emilio Fernández is the Chief Editor of the magazine Diagoras: International Academic Journal on Olympic Studies and the author of more than 50 articles, books, and academic chapters.