Full Professor
Estela Maricela Villalón de la Isla
Full-time professor «A» at the Centro Universitario del Norte, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico.
Researcher in higher education devoted to the study of internationalisation processes in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is coordinator of the UNESCO Chair «Internationalisation of Higher Education and Global Citizenship» at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. She has published widely in the field and has led national and international research projects.
Her work on the internationalisation of higher education has global reach: she has collaborated actively with international institutions such as the University of Regina in Canada, the Universidad de Granada in Spain, the Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico COMFENALCO in Colombia and the Universidad de Playa Ancha in Chile. She also has a solid record of research and training stays at institutions in Poland, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
In advanced and continuing training, she coordinates key projects such as the «Online Diploma in Managing the Internationalisation of Higher Education for Latin America and the Caribbean» (2026 edition), the «Third Regional Survey on the State of Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean», and the psychometric analysis and cross-national validation of the CuSMAI questionnaire on the factors shaping international student mobility in Mexican and Chilean universities. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNII, level I) and a full-time professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara.
Her career combines research with institutional management: she led the Internationalisation Area of the Centro Universitario del Norte (CUNorte) of the Universidad de Guadalajara between 2014 and 2019, strengthening international student mobility, managing collaboration proposals with foreign universities and coordinating the research project on student perceptions of mobility together with researchers from higher education institutions in Spain and Argentina.
She holds a doctorate in Educational Sciences with International Mention from the Universidad de Granada, Spain, and is a full-time professor «A» at the Centro Universitario del Norte (CUNorte) of the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico.
