Coordinator of the university team of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM-University Team).
Sara Fernández López
Sara Fernández López has held a PhD since 2001, with a thesis on the financing of higher education systems. Since 2023 she has been Full Professor at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), having been accredited to that rank by ANECA in January 2022.
She had previously been Associate Professor (Profesora Titular) in the same faculty since 2018. Over her academic career she has accumulated more than 23 years of experience as a teacher and researcher.
Her main lines of research lie in entrepreneurship (including technology-based and academic entrepreneurship) and firm performance (growth, innovation and survival). She also works actively on household finance, approaching all of these fields empirically through applied microeconometrics.
She has led, as principal investigator (PI), 3 competitive research projects at European, national and regional level.
Principal investigator of the contract “Research on knowledge transfer and entrepreneurship activities in the Spanish university system from a gender perspective”, funded by the Spanish Women’s Institute (2023-2024).
In addition, she has been a team member on a further 17 competitive research projects, with total funding amounting to €1,451,940.
Álvarez Espiño, M.; Fernández-López, S.; Rey Ares, L. (2026). “Sound Financial Practices and Entrepreneurs’ Socio-Environmental Commitment: Revealing the Role of Financial Barriers”. Business Strategy and the Environment.
Fernández López, S.; Álvarez-Espiño, M.; Rey Ares, L. (2026). “Age and Financial Vulnerability Dimensions”. Journal of Population Ageing.
Ferreirós-Rodríguez, C.; Fernández-López, S.; Rey-Ares, L. (2026). “Problemas de salud y endeudamiento de los hogares en España: un análisis exploratorio”. Gaceta Sanitaria, 40.
Fernández-López, S.; Rodríguez-Gulías, M.J.; Calvo, N.; Rodeiro-Pazos, D. (2025). “Gender diversity and innovation performance in family firms: Evidence from the Spanish manufacturing industry”. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 77.
Fernández López, S.; Álvarez-Espiño, M.; Rey Ares, L.; Castro-González, S. (2024). “Consumer financial vulnerability: Review, synthesis, and future research agenda”. Journal of Economic Surveys, 38(4), pp. 1045-1084.
She stands out for her substantial contribution to knowledge transfer through collaboration with industry and the public sector, and is co-author of numerous technical reports used in the design of public policy.
She has contributed to 13 executive reports of GEM GALICIA (from 2010 to the present) and to 11 “UNIVERSITIC: ICT in the Spanish University System” reports (2007-2017), commissioned by CRUE.
She has secured more than €250,000 through research contracts (under Article 83 of the Spanish University Act), having led 2 of them and collaborated on a further 19.
She holds 2 recognised six-year research assessment periods (sexenios), the most recent covering 2010-2016, with a third applied for covering 2017-2022.
She has an excellent scientific output comprising 46 JCR-indexed articles (8 of them in the top decile), together with more than 3,097 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 29 (2023 figures).
She has extensive experience in training research talent, having supervised 9 doctoral theses (7 of which received awards) and mentored numerous predoctoral, postdoctoral and FPU fellows.
