Vice-President for External Relations, International Council for Science (ICSU)

Observer, IAC Board

Sergio Jorge Pastrana was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1950. He graduated from the School of Letters and Arts of the University of Havana on History of English Literature and Culture in 1975, and he has done postgraduate studies at the Institute of International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Cuba. His interests on international cooperation relate to the history of early international contacts of the Cuban scientific community, and its influence on the building of a national scientific capacity in Cuba, a subject on which he has published and lectured, both in Cuba and abroad.

Pastrana has been involved in the establishment and coordination of international programs of cooperation of the Academia de Ciencias de Cuba since 1975. He has been a Secretary to the Cuban National Committee for ICSU since that year. Since 1983 he was appointed as head of the Department for Academic Cooperation of the Cuban Academy.

From 1992 to 1996 he was the Representative of the Government of Cuba to the Implementing Committee, and eventually to the Executive Council, of the Inter American Institute on Global Change Research (IAI). From 1994 to 1996 he was appointed as Deputy Director for International Cooperation at the Ministry for Science, Technology, and Environment of the Republic of Cuba.

Since 1996 he has been the Foreign Secretary of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has served in different commissions and boards for Cuban scientific institutions and societies, and presently he is a member of the Advisory Commission on International Relations of the Minister for Science, Technology and Environment of Cuba. Since the year 2010 he has been Executive Director of the Cuban Academy of Sciences.

A full member of the Cuban Academy, Pastrana is a member of the Caribbean Academy of Sciences since 2000, and he was made Honorary Member there in 2010. In the same year he was also elected as a Foreign Member of the Academy of Sciences in Guatemala. He is also a member of the Board of the Caribbean Scientific Union, an organization of all academies of sciences of the Wider Caribbean Basin. He is a representative of the Cuban Academy of Sciences to the IAP - the global network of science academies since 2003, where he has been directly involved in the groups coordinating initiatives on Biosecurity and Genetically Modified Organisms, and as part of the Membership Committee since its establishment in 2003. Since the following year, 2004, he has also been a national representative to the Inter American Network of Academies of Sciences (IANAS).

Within ICSU he has served as an Ordinary Member of the Executive Board in the period 2005-2011. In that capacity he has also served as a member of the Regional Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean, and as a member of the Committee on Finance.