I was born and raised in Majadahonda, a town in the outskirts of Madrid, Spain. I have always been fascinated by aviation (frustrated career path: fighter pilot) which pretty much helped me narrow my college choices. In 2002 I started my undergrad at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos (ETSIA-UPM). During my stay at ETSIA, I got my first contact with research and numerical analysis through a research assistantship in the Aeroelasticty lab under the supervision of Prof. Pablo García-Fogeda. I also got to experience the international spirit of the aerospace industry as a student in the CVA summer school 2006. In 2007, I graduated with an Aerospace Engineer degree from ETSIA, majoring in Aircraft Design.

During my search for a research oriented job I came across SEADM, a startup focused on the development of explosive detection devices. I joined SEADM in September 2007 as a junior research engineer and came to the US for the first time as a Visiting Assistant in Research with Prof. Juan Fernández de la Mora (Yale University), co-founder of SEADM, and exceptional scientist and innovator.

After 6 months, I moved back to SEADM's headquarters to take the lead in one of their explosive detection projects and ended up as program manager for the initial phases of the Air Cargo Explosive Screener (ACES) system, a joint venture with Morpho (former SAGEM Sécurité), one of the strongest companies in the field of security. Overall, the time I spent in SEADM was extremely rewarding as I got to learn a lot from the scientific perspective as well as the management side of such a technology oriented business.

After this, I had made up my mind about grad school and decided to apply for a PhD in the US. I was admitted to MIT and moved to Cambridge (USA) in September 2009 to work with Prof. Jaume Peraire on computational fluid dynamics. Here I met Dr. Cuong Nguyen who made me aware of the many virtues of high order methods and convinced me to dig deeper into them. He succedded and since then I focused my research on high order methods applied to fluid flows. I defended my thesis on this topic in December 2014.

During most of my time at MIT I was able to secure my own external funding as a grateful recipient of the CajaMadrid scholarship followed by the LaCaixa scholarship. This has given me freedom to explore whatever topic I was interested in. In particular, I have worked on projects related to shock capturing, turbulence modeling, and boundary layer adaptivity, all within the framework of the Hybridized Discontinuous Galerkin method.

During the last year of my PhD I had the chance to get involved in digital learning as a teching assistant for 16.110X: Flight Vehicle Aerodynamics, the online version of the graduate level course of the same name at MIT. This course delivered a formal introduction to a variety of topics in Aerodynamics, to hundreds of students from all over the world. Being part of this has been an incredible experience in many ways.

Thanks for visiting my webpage. Cheers!

P.S.: My partner, Carmen Guerra-García, also got her PhD from MIT doing research (that I cannot understand) on non-equilibrium plasmas . I'm still trying to convince her to get a webpage...