Elena González-Blanco
Independent Board Director and Chair of the Audit Commission
Elena González-Blanco (Independent Board Director): Member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Audit Commission (appointed 04/06/2021). Global Head of Digital for Wealth Management and Insurance at Banco Santander (EVP). Previously, she was the General Manager for Europe at the insurtech start-up Coverwallet, acquired by AON in January 2020, where she was also a member of the Executive Committee of AON Iberia. Before that, she was the Head of Product Development in Artificial Intelligence at Minsait-Indra. An expert in artificial intelligence and the digital transformation, she is specialized in the field of linguistic technology.
She holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master’s Degree in IT Systems from UC3M, and has also studied executive training programs at LSE London, MIT and ESADE. She has been both a lecturer and a researcher at Harvard University, and is currently a Professor of Artificial Intelligence applied to business at IE Business School, and lectures at both ICAI and AFI. A researcher of recognized international prestige, she heads up POSTDATA – an ERC European research project of excellence in language processing and semantic web (+€1m). She was the Director and founder of the first Innovation Laboratory in Digital Humanities in Spain: www.linhd.es, and is also a member of a number of international committees (member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the largest European linguistic technology research infrastructure www.clarin.eu and advisor to the venture capital company Conexo, as well as various technology start-ups).
She was chosen as number 1 in 2018 and number 3 in 2019 on the Choiseul "Future Economic Leader in Spain” ranking www.choiseul.es, and awarded the 2021 WIDS (Women in Machine Learning and Data Science) prize, has been selected as one of the Top 100 women in Spain in the 2016, 2017 and 2018 editions of the event www.lastop100.es and awarded the Julián Marías 2017 research prize in the category of under 40s.