Carles Solà, the chemical engineer who ran the Autonomous University of Barcelona for eight years and later presided over Spain's conference of university rectors, died on September 12, 2026. He was 81.
Solà's death was confirmed by the university community in Sant Cugat del Vallès, the campus town north of Barcelona where the UAB has sat since its founding in 1968. He led the institution from 1994 to 2002.
Born in Xàtiva, in Valencia Province, on January 1, 1945, Solà built his early career at the University of Valencia before moving to the UAB, where he taught chemical engineering. He held a doctorate in chemistry and worked in biochemical engineering, a field that would define his research life.
The numbers attached to that research are specific. More than 130 publications. Twenty-two doctoral theses supervised. Research projects directed across his working years. Those figures place him among the more productive scientists to hold the rector's office in Spain during that period.
His rectorate, which ran from 1994 to 2002, coincided with a stretch of expansion and reform in Spanish higher education. Universities were absorbing new funding models, adapting to European integration and facing the first serious debates about international rankings. Solà steered the UAB through that decade.
After leaving the rector's office, Solà moved into the upper tiers of academic governance. He became president of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities, the body that represents the country's public universities before the state. He joined the executive committee of the International Association of University Presidents and took a board seat at the European University Association.
Those roles placed him in the rooms where European higher education policy was being written in the early 2000s. The Bologna Process, the harmonisation of degree structures across the continent, was reshaping universities while Solà held those positions. He was one of the Spanish voices in that conversation.
Solà's own field, biochemical engineering, sits at the intersection of chemistry and biology, a discipline concerned with fermentation, enzymes and the industrial use of living cells. His doctorate in chemistry gave him the foundation; his later work pushed into applications. The 130-plus publications span that arc.
He was born on the first day of 1945, which put him at 81 at the time of his death. The date of birth, January 1, also made him a Capricorn, a detail the death notices carried.
The UAB campus at Sant Cugat del Vallès has produced a stream of rectors who went on to national roles, and Solà was among the most prominent. His presidency of the rectors' conference gave him a platform beyond Catalonia, in Madrid and across Spain's autonomous communities.
Catalan politics ran through his career, as it runs through the UAB itself. The university, founded in 1968 during the final years of the Franco regime and built on the promise of Catalan self-government in education, has always been a political institution as much as an academic one. Solà's tenure as rector and his later national roles put him at the centre of that tension.
The Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities, known by its Spanish initials CRUE, is the main lobby for public universities in Spain. Solà's presidency of that body, combined with his European positions, made him a regular at education ministry meetings and EU roundtables through the early 2000s.
His death on September 12, 2026, closes a career that ran from a chemistry lab in Valencia to the boardrooms of European higher education. The UAB will mark his passing, as it has marked the passing of its other former rectors.
The campus he led for eight years still shows his influence. The research groups he directed continue to publish. The 22 doctoral students he supervised have their own students now. That is the measure of an academic life.
According to Dead-People.