Francisco Barnés de Castro

Who is Francisco Barnés de Castro?

Francisco José Barnés de Castro is a Mexican academic and consultant. From 6 January 1997 to 12 November 1999 he served as rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the largest university in the Spanish-speaking world.

Barnés de Castro graduated with a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received both a master's degree and a doctorate degree in the same discipline from University of California, Berkeley. He is a long-standing academic and researcher at the National Autonomous University, where he has led the Faculty of Chemistry and served as rector until a major student strike, provoked by his proposal to significantly increase its tuition, forced him to resign.

In the public sector, he has served as Undersecretary of Hydrocarbons and Undersecretary of Energy Policy Technological Development at the Mexican Secretariat of Energy and as Director-General of the Mexican Petroleum Institute. Overseas, he has worked as an international consultant for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy and in the Joint Public Consultative Committee of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation of North America.