Biodata María Llanos Carrión Varela

María Llanos Carrión Varela currently works as Technical Director at the EU and International Research Projects Office of the University of Castilla- La Mancha (Spain). She has been a speaker in many events connected to management of European funds for research projects, and also acts as LEAR (Legal Entities Appointed Representative) of her University before the European Commission for CIP and FP7 research programmes. She combines her administrative and managerial work with her study in Linguistics and Knowledge Engineering.

She graduated in English Philology at the University of Murcia (Spain) in 2004, having spent one academic year (2002-03) as an Erasmus student at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). After her degree, she completed her Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in Modern Foreign Languages for Secondary (Spanish and German) at the University of Derby (United Kingdom) in 2005. She has also taught Modern Foreign Languages in secondary schools in the United Kingdom for several years.

She is currently reading her dissertation about Knowledge Engineering for completion of a MA in English Applied Linguistics at the National University of Distance Education (UNED, Spain), which will be followed by a subsequent PhD.

Her research interests comprise Computational and Cognitive Linguistics, Knowledge Engineering, ontologies, Artificial Intelligence and Semantic web applications, as well as language universals and metaphorical phenomena.