Welcome to my website! If you came here searching for a quick summary of my professional career, please have a look at my short CV. Alternatively, if you want to read a more verbose summary of my professional and personal life, just keep reading. And if you can’t find what you were looking for, please contact me, I’ll be happy to hear from you.

Contents

Science

My career in science has been devoted to two main fields: Astrophysics (in particular, gravitational waves and radioastronomy) and data science (where I’m including machine learning and artificial intelligence). To access more content on these topics, please visit my Science page.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

I did my PhD in astrophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover (Germany), the place where gravitational waves were observed for the first time in history, leading to the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2017. Prior to my doctoral degree, I studied Physics at the University of Seville (Spain) and did an MSc in nuclear physics at the University of Münster (Germany). I have attended a dozen summer schools and lecture series in Physics, Astronomy and Data Analysis (in Australia, France, Germany, Poland, USA, UK, and Spain) and did a three-month-long internship in Quantum Information Theory at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona.

After completing my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Albert Einstein Institute, at the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology and at the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University in Melbourne (Australia).

The main focus of my research was gravitational wave astronomy, for which I have done both theoretical and observational work. I have been a member various international collaborations: the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA), the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA), the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

As an academic, I have given talks and lectures at numerous conferences, universities and research centres around the globe, and published articles in high-impact journals.

As part of my research, I predicted the boundaries of the gravitational wave background produced by sources like binaries of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. I led a project that predicted the properties of the first gravitational wave detection of supermassive black hole binaries. I also discovered that supermassive black holes can be detected much further away than previously thought. In fact, some of them could become the most distant astrophysical objects we will ever be able to observe.

To have a look at my complete published research, you can access my PhD thesis and my Google Scholar profile.

Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

The field of gravitational wave astronomy is dominated by data analysis. In the case of LIGO, observing these waves involves disentangling tiny waveforms buried in noise. And by tiny I mean waves that typically produce a vibration of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth the size of the detector. In the case of Pulsar Timing, an observation involves correlating decades of data from different radio telescopes, made of milli-second pulses. Thus, by doing research in this field I had to work with Bayesian and frequentist statistics, but also with common machine learning algorithms.

In 2017, I left academia and started working at GFT (a technology consultancy company in Barcelona) as a full-time data scientist, on different applications of artificial intelligence (AI) for the finance sector. In particular, I have worked on applications of natural language processing (such as document classification and named entity recognition), and computer vision (object detection and tracking in live videos), as well as other projects using machine learning and deep learning algorithms.

Here I’m giving a presentation about AI applications in the finance sector, at the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Germany.

Working at GFT gave me the chance to present my work on applied AI at a number of events in Spain and Germany, which include the site of Google in Madrid, the German stock exchange (Deutsche Börse) in Frankfurt, and the headquarters of first-tier banks.

At the end of 2018, I left GFT to start working at Holaluz, one of the leading renewable energy retailers in Spain. There I used statistical and machine learning techniques to predict the energy usage of hundreds of thousands of households. Apart from time series forecasting, I also developed different internal applications to improve communications with clients (like classifying incoming emails) and to deter clients from leaving the company (churn prediction).

At Holaluz I did not only do pure data science but also data engineering: deploying scalable services, developing end-to-end machine learning pipelines and testing and maintaining applications. I also worked with the business intelligence team and developed dashboards to monitor and better comprehend different processes.

In 2021, I was given the opportunity to work for the European Union Intellectual Property Office. I decided to accept the offer, with the main goal of increasing my career capital. There, I worked on different applications of natural language processing, computer vision, search engines, and graph machine learning. I was in charge of the design of data pipelines, model selection, deployment, and maintenance of different distributed systems. In particular, I deployed a system that predicted the similarity of pairs of goods and services, described by a short text. It also searched for the most semantically similar pairs of goods and services in a database, and provided an explanation of why they were considered similar.

If you want to know more about my experience leaving academia, and transitioning to a data science job in industry, please visit my Academia vs. Industry page.

Data Science for Social Good

In 2019, I was chosen to be one of the two technical mentors for the Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) summer school, organised by the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Warwick (UK). I taught different topics related to data science and machine learning to outstanding students, with an emphasis on their ethical implications. I led data science projects with a positive social impact, ensuring the interpretability of the models and reducing unethical biases.

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can help humankind flourish in ways we can’t imagine today. But it can also have dystopian consequences, or even lead to our self-destruction. That’s why after working at DSSG, I started taking more responsibility for the outcomes of my work. In the absence of an official Hippocratic Oath for Data Science, I hereby declare that:

I will not work on projects that are actively harmful for sentient beings, and I will do my best to avoid unexpected negative consequences of my work.

After many years of astrophysics research and data science work, I’m ready to make a positive change in the world, and I want to apply my technical skills to effectively tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Our World in Data

In 2022 I started working for Our World in Data. I am developing transparent and reproducible pipelines and analysing data on many different topics, which so far include:

  • Energy: Energy and electricity mix around the world, environmental impacts of energy production, etc.
  • Climate change impacts: Global warming, sea-level rise, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.
  • Food: Production, land use, imports and exports, etc.
  • War in Ukraine: Implications in terms of natural resources and energy.

At Our World in Data, I am contributing to publishing data and research to make progress against the world’s largest problems.

Music

I studied music at the Jerez School of Music and Seville Professional Conservatory of Music, with piano as my main instrument. I have been writing my own compositions since I was a child, and have performed as a piano soloist and in bands in Europe and Australia. You can listen to some of my solo piano music on my Spotify page. All videos on my YouTube channel have music made by me, which include soundtracks for documentaries and short films.

Aside from this, in 2017 I started making music with my partner (in music, life and other crimes) Mel Brennan. You can find some of this music on Mel’s Spotify page. All of her songs were arranged, produced and mixed by myself or both of us together. In fact, we recently published our first studio album, called Half Lives, which you can listen to on Spotify.

To read my posts about music, you can visit my Music page.

Videos

I have directed, filmed, edited and coloured numerous short videos. I attended a Filmmaking Summer School at the University of Melbourne and a course on documentary-making at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. I have edited videos for universities, NGOs and other private events, and have collaborated on a documentary with an Emmy-awarded director.

Science communication is another one of my passions, which is why most videos on my YouTube Channel are about science. In fact, two of them have won awards in international contests.

I have also co-produced all of Mel Brennan’s music videos, for example, Searching, Oh Coal! and in particular Oceans Rising, a very special music video which I also co-directed, edited and coloured.

To read my posts about videos, you can visit my Video page.

Altruism

In the last few years I have been experiencing a sort of personal metamorphosis. Over time I have become aware of many things that we usually do that unknowingly have a negative impact somewhere else, and the many things we do not do, that could easily have a positive one. Put simply:

I want to live a life that does not imply the suffering of others.

Veganism and effective altruism are concepts that used to be foreign to me, yet all are now central to the way I think and live. I believe that our society would benefit hugely from them, but unfortunately, there are still many misconceptions and habits that lead us astray. For example, there is the common misassociation of veganism with esotericism and naivety, or the common belief that things are the way they have always been and we do not have a responsibility towards them nor the power to change anything.

Our world is changing rapidly, and we increasingly have more access to information and tools to firstly, construct a well-informed, fact-based picture of current affairs, and secondly, make our life choices more in line with our principles. There are simple ways to adjust your lifestyle, not only to live healthily and happily, but also to minimise the negative impact on other people, animals, and the environment.

I try to minimise the negative impact of my own actions by not contributing to the industry of animal products or industries which pollute the environment or exploit workers. I adopted a vegan lifestyle in early 2015, I support ethical banks and investments, donate 10% of my salary to effective charities, do volunteer work, and organise outreach events about effective altruism. Finally, I have invested a large fraction of my life developing my career in data science and artificial intelligence, with the aim of using it for the common good of present and future generations of sentient beings.

If you want to access more content on these topics, you can visit my Altruism page.