Bio

Visual CV

Traditional CV available here

The early years (1984-2002)

I was born in 1984 in the Spanish town of Guadalajara, 50 km north-east from Madrid. There I attended high school between 1998 and 2002.

As usually happens with happy childhoods, there's not much to tell about it.

The physics years (2002-2012)

In 2002 I was accepted at the Physics School of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I attended my studies while living and working as maths tutor in Guadalajara. The daily 3-hour commuting, and my work, forced me to enroll as a half-time student and graduate slower than I wanted to.

In 2012 I obtained my Licenciatura (spanish equivalent of masters' degree, 5 years long) in physics, with the specialization in física fundamental (theoretical physics) and a thesis on 3D image reconstruction on an Artificial Vision system.

The optics years (2012-2015)

In 2012, immediately after graduating, I started working as Research and Development Engineer for Indizen Optical Technologies. Based in Madrid, IOT is a company focused on the design of lenses for human use. My team took care of the numerical simulations, optimization of surfaces' shapes, ray tracing, design of clinical trials, software development and maintenance and the investigation of new technologies and methods. To put it short: everything related to the physics and math behind the lens making process.

During those years, my interest in programming languages and methods grew dramatically.

The applied mathematics years (2015-2020)

In 2015 I received a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher grant in order to conduct a PhD in applied mathematics at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. The project was part of the CRITICS (CRItical Transitions In Complex Systems) consortium, coordinated by Imperial College London, and gave me a golden opportunity to visit several European institutions.

My research focused on modeling and simulating biological systems described by non-linear dynamics. Some examples are plankton ecosystems, cell-development and sleep-wake models. My main working tools were dynamical systems theory (with a focus on bifurcation analysis) and numerical simulation.

The main outcome of those years was the thesis entitled "Cycles and interactions: a mathematician among biologists", publicly defended in Wageningen on June 15th, 2020.

The RSE years (2019-now)

In 2019, I started working as Research Software Engineer for the Netherlands eScience Center. My role there is to develop usable solutions to problems as diverse as analyzing satellite imagery, parallelizing computational fluid dynamics algorithms, or guaranteeing reproducibility of scientific code.

I am also deeply involved in the teaching and dissemination of software engineering tools and protocols among the scientific community.

Science communication (2011-now)

With more than two million visits per month, naukas.com is the larger science communication website in spanish language. I collaborate with them regularly, mostly in the form of written short essays about physics, mathematics and engineering, some of them featuring interactive visualizations.

Since 2011, and under the patronage of the Basque Country University, we organize a yearly science communication festival that, in the last editions, congregated an audience of a few thousands.

These activities have been the background "soundtrack" of the last years.

All my science communication activity is listed here.