Cintia
Pla García

Cintia Pla-García has been a Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) since 2009. For more than a decade, she has directed several marketing programmes at UOC, including the Postgraduate Programme in Consumer Research, the Postgraduate Programme in Corporate Communication and Image Management, and the Master’s Programme in Marketing Management and Communication. She also directed the Master’s Programme in Marketing and Sales Management within UOC Corporate, tailored for professionals at Catalana Occidente. She has served as Academic Director of Continuing Education in the Marketing Area and as Programme Director of the Postgraduate Programme in Marketing Management and Sales Management at UOC. She is also a collaborator of the AIEOU Hub Research – AI in Education, within the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She has taught courses in marketing and mathematics, collaborated with international universities such as UNIMINUTO, and co-directed executive education programmes with institutions such as EADA Business School. Since 2017, she has curated marketing content for the UOC Faculty of Economics and Business Blog. Dr. Pla-García holds a PhD in Business from the University of Barcelona, a BSc in Management Information Systems Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), and a BSc (Hons) in Multimedia Computing from Wrexham Glyndŵr University (Wales, UK). She also holds a Master’s Degree in Market Research from the University of Barcelona and a Master’s Degree in Information and Knowledge Society from UOC. She is currently pursuing an Online Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Founderz Business School, certified by Microsoft. She is an active member of several national and international academic and professional organisations, including the Spanish Academy of Management (ACEDE), the British Academy of Management (BAM), the Club de Marketing Barcelona, and the Spanish Marketing Association (AMKT). She is also involved in technology-focused organisations such as Women Tech Network and Women in Tech. In addition, she serves as an ambassador for Women Tech Network and Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide, and represents UOC in the “Connecting Enterprise with Young Talent” initiative promoted by the Club de Marketing Barcelona. Her research interests include consumer behaviour, e-learning, sustainability, the sharing economy, the Economy for the Common Good, and artificial intelligence. She has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences. As a researcher, she has been a member of established research groups at UOC, including the Digital Business Research Group (DigiBiz) and the Management and e-Learning Research Group (MeL). She is currently co-supervising three doctoral theses, two of which focus on the adoption and application of artificial intelligence. Dr. Pla-García is a certified reviewer for Elsevier and Springer Nature and has reviewed manuscripts for Education and Information Technologies, the official journal of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committees, published in association with UNESCO. She participated in the European TeSLA Innovation and Research Project, which developed an AI-based e-assessment system for authenticating students in online learning environments. She has also served on the Organising Committee of several editions of the International Conference on Advances in National Brand and Private Label Marketing (NB&PL), the leading scientific conference in this field, whose proceedings are published by Springer.