Carles Llorens Maluquer is a tenured professor in the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

His main research lines focus on European communication policies and public television and its regulation. The primary field in which his scientific contributions stand out is the structure of communication. Thus, his doctoral thesis presented in 2001 on “Concentration of Communication Companies and Pluralism: The Action of the EU” marks an important milestone in Spain by contributing to developments in Europe regarding the regulation of media concentration. It is, in fact, the most cited publication among all those he has published, with 80 citations as of December 2022. In it, he advocated for the criterion of audience concentration as a potentially useful tool to ensure pluralism in the media. Spain incorporated a cap of 27% of accumulated audience share in television to avoid audiovisual oligopolies in the 2010 audiovisual legislation. The thesis was funded by the European Commission through a Marie Curie predoctoral fellowship developed at the University of Namur over two years, which allowed him to gain the ability to work in an interdisciplinary and international team.

This international training was further reinforced by a 12-month stay at the Center for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford between 2006-2007 as an academic visitor. He was also the Spanish delegate in the COST A30 action: "East of West: Setting a New Central Eastern European Media Research Agenda" (2007-2010).

Following the thesis, this research line has continued to bear fruit with various publications (2003, 2006, 2011, 2019). Specifically, in 2008, state funding was obtained for an R+D+I plan for a research project on how to address media concentration in a digital environment and the necessary communication policies, funded with €45,000 by the Ministry of Education and Science. He led and coordinated a team of 8 researchers from various Spanish universities between 2009 and 2011, and several articles were published on the findings, proposing a concentration index based on the weighting of audience shares for each medium and sector.

This knowledge of European communication policies has allowed him to contribute to society through various entities and foundations with non-indexed publications in the form of reports or studies. Thus, he has been able to address the digital transformation of media in Spain with the 2013 report for the OSI Foundation, “Mapping Digital Media in Spain.” He has also regularly collaborated on various reports commissioned by the European Commission and/or the European Audiovisual Observatory on different aspects of media regulation in Europe, such as access to pay television in Spain (2004); media pluralism indicators (2008); the independence of media regulatory authorities (2009 and 2019); the regulation of convergence in Spain (2013); and the implementation in Spain of the latest version of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (2020). Similarly, he has published a manual on “Spanish Media Law” together with Professor Ana Azurmendi for the prestigious publisher Wolters & Kluwer, aimed at non-Spanish legal professionals who wish to understand media regulation in Spain.

Regarding the training of young researchers, he has supervised 5 doctoral theses, two of which were co-tutored with an international mention. Three articles derived from these doctoral theses have been published in indexed journals. He currently has an H-index of 10 on Google Scholar, with 406 citations received.