Pedro Urra González

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He completed his university studies at the Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales de la República de Cuba, ISRI where he graduated with a gold medal in January 1984.

Upon graduation, he was selected to join the faculty of the institute where he worked between 1984 and 1991 as a professor. From then on, he dedicated himself to computing and information work, completing specialized postgraduate studies in information and computing.

He combined teaching and research duties, overseeing the introduction of computing in the specialty and was responsible for forming the scientific-technical information department of the institute, its automation, and collaborated on the automation projects of the ministry of foreign affairs.

He participated in international courses including one at the International Negotiation Center in Geneva directed by Jean Freymond and information and automation projects at UNCTAD.

He was part of the delegation that visited Harvard University in 1989 for the exchange of experiences and participation in a United Nations simulation, focusing on documentation and automation issues.

He was part of the Cuban delegation that visited the National Defence College of Canada in a professional exchange for the subsequent formation of the College in Cuba on the same topics.

He developed systems for library automation and indexing systems that were introduced in the library system and information centers of the network of higher education centers in Cuba, and in numerous libraries throughout Latin America.

He collaborated on automation tasks with the documentation center of the Regional Office of Culture of UNESCO for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Between 1992 and 2010, he has conducted various advisory services and evaluation missions for UNESCO and the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO.

He was commissioned by UNESCO to evaluate the automation project of the National Library of the Argentine Republic whose report and recommendations served as the basis for the center's automation project and worked on the development of a library network project through the Internet as well as on plans for retrospective conversion of its collections.

He has taught specialized Internet courses for UNAMAZ, UNESCO, the Pan American Health Organization, the Latin American and Caribbean Center for Information in Health Sciences, BIREME and others.

He advised on the automation and Web integration projects of the National Library of Venezuela and advised on the automation project of the Library of the Central University of Venezuela.

He worked as an adviser to the Medical Computing Foundation of Argentina and collaborated on the editorial projects "Health, Information Society and Developing Countries" and "Internet, Telematics and Health" coordinated by the European Commission DG XIII.

He participated in the international Beta Test for evaluating BITNIS, a system for accessing MEDLINE databases on demand from the National Library of Medicine of the USA.

Since 1992 he has worked at the National Center for Information of Medical Sciences of Cuba where he has been in charge of Infomed, which emerged as a UNDP project, serving as its coordinator. He is director of the network resulting from the Infomed project, which is the Cuban network that provides Internet services to the health sector and which manages the Health Web.

He coordinates the Virtual Health Library project in Cuba and works with the regional center of the Pan American Health Organization for the implementation of this regional project, serving as an adviser.

He was a founder, along with other members, of the Cubaweb project, Cuba's first Web on the Internet, which was originally developed on Infomed. He was selected by the Director General of the Pan American Health Organization to serve on the Commission for Evaluation of the PAHO-BIREME information system which visited several countries in the region and met with national authorities from these countries to present a proposal to the PAHO Director for the PAHO information strategy, being a participant, from the beginning, of the Virtual Health Library project of the Americas.

He has collaborated with the UNDP Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean on the Sustainable Development Network project and its informatization strategy.

He was a consultant for PAHO to evaluate the informatization project of the Ministry of Health of Ecuador and the implementation of the Virtual Health Library in the country, developing a strategy and recommendations for the automation of the system.

He develops advisory work for the development of the Virtual Health Library project in Jamaica. He is working as a UNESCO consultant on its project for the development of the Digital Library of Latin America and the Caribbean.

He participated in an evaluation mission of the UNDP Regional Project for informatization of the management of foreign ministries and presidencies of the Republic in Paraguay and Uruguay.

He is a full professor and auxiliary researcher of the Faculty of Communication of the University of Havana. He is a member of national commissions for the informatization of Cuban society on topics related to the Internet and systematically collaborates with national institutions and organizations on informatization and networks, tasks that he combines with the direction of Infomed.

In 2010 he obtained, through competitive examination, the position of Director of the Regional Health Library of the Americas of the Pan American Health Organization headquartered in Sao Paulo, Brazil.