Francesc Torres Torres (1962) was the rector of the UPC from December 2017 to June 2021 and the director of the Department of Signal Theory and Communications from 2013 to 2017.

He was born in Sant Joan de Labritja (Eivissa) in 1962. He has a degree in Telecommunications Engineering (1988) from the Barcelona School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSETB) and a doctoral degree (1992) from the UPC. He is attached to the UPC's Department of Signal Theory and Communications, where he teaches, from 2010 as a full professor, and carries out research in the field of radio communications, high frequency circuits and Earth observation. He began his career at the European Space Agency (ESA, the Netherlands, 1988) and joined the UPC as an adjunct professor of the ETSETB in 1989. In the sphere of teaching, he was the assistant director-head of studies of the ETSETB (1998-2000) and the coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus master's degree in Research on Information and Communication Technologies (2006-2009). He was awarded the Teaching Improvement Award (1997) by the UPC's Board of Trustees for the Radiation and Guided Waves Laboratory (ETSETB).

As a member of the UPC's Remote Sensing Research Group (RSLab), since 1994 he has participated in more than 50 contracts with industry as a scientific and technological advisor on developing, characterising and monitoring the SMOS sensor (ESA), the first satellite led by Spanish industry (EADS CASA Espacio). Since its launch in November 2009, the SMOS mission has supplied uninterrupted radiometric measurements for water cycle studies, climate model improvement and weather prediction. As a result of this activity, he has co-authored more than 200 publications in prestigious international journals and conferences and, as a member of the research group, has received the following distinctions: the Duran Farell Award (2000) from the UPC’s Board of Trustees, the Ciutat de Barcelona Award (2001), the Salvà i Campillo Award (2004) from the Catalan Association of Telecommunications Engineers and the Cristòfol Juandó Award in Aeronautics (2011) from the Barcelona City Council. He was a founding vice-chair of the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre for Ocean Salinity and Radiometric Calibration (2007-2010). He is currently a member of the UPC's CommSensLab, a 2017-2020 María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence.

In the framework of the Ministry of Education's mobility programme, he spent a sabbatical year at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech (California, USA), from 2005 to 2006, hosted as an external advisor to the GeoSTAR project, a geostationary satellite for monitoring the atmosphere.

In the professional sphere, in the period 2000-2002 he helped to set up the Official College of Telecommunications Engineers of Catalonia (COETC), lending support to its technical secretariat. In this framework, up to the year 2002 he participated in several initiatives for promoting the profession and the professional development of ETSETB graduates, including organising the reports "75 propostes per al desenvolupament de la societat de la informació a Catalunya" [75 Proposals for the Development of the Information Society in Catalonia] and "Estudi de la situació socioprofessional dels enginyers de Telecomunicació de Catalunya, 2002" [A Study of the Social and Professional Status of Telecommunications Engineers in Catalonia, 2002]. He also 

participated in organising and moderating the Working Sessions on Telecommunications and Local Administration, which were held in various places in Catalonia in 2002, with the collaboration of provincial and regional councils.

Former rectors