| I hold Mexican, French and British nationalities and permanent residence in Sweden (and probably soon citizenship) where I spend part of my time. I can be found a good deal of time in the UK if not caught in some other place overseas. I was born and raised in Mexico City until my mid 20s. When I was 8 years old I wanted to be a scientist and later also a writer. I was mostly drawn by experimentation, computers and fundamental science. When I turned 13, I became a computer salesman only to be close to digital computers (and to contribute to my family's income). My father wasn't able to buy me a personal computer until I was 16 (they were already popular among my friends since I was 8), he bought me a second-hand desktop computer which I used to produce and sell computer animations with Autodesk Animator Pro. At 16, I was also the founder and first president of a newly created astronomical club (read the story here) in the city of Queretaro close to Mexico City, where I studied most of my secondary and high school, a club that persists still today and has grown and become one of the most successful in the country ever since. I gave a talk at its 25 anniversary (2019) at the state university and I may have the chance to give another one at its 50 anniversary. After finishing my bachelor's degree in mathematics at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), I was hired by Wolfram Research, the world-leading company in mathematical and scientific software working directly with its CEO and renowned scientist Stephen Wolfram at his personal think tank office in Boston in the U.S. working on aspects of data science, computational linguistics and fast prototyping. I introduced new built-in functions to Mathematica and the Wolfram Language and I was a member of the first (and then small, about 5 people) Wolfram|Alpha team, today the popular factual answering machine providing some of e.g. Apple's Siri answers around the world. During my first years as a Ph.D student, I was an intern at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also in Boston in the U.S., as part of the payload team for NASA's Mars Gravity Biosatellite project, a project consisting of a similar idea to Kubrick's rotational ship to reproduce gravity force. I was also a visiting scholar at the Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA in the U.S. where I advanced some automatic proving techniques to quantify the probability to find a proof after trying for some amount of time. While living in the U.S., I decided to continue my Masters in Paris, France where I had travelled several times before as a kid due to my father's job and as a teen due to my own job as a co-founder of an e-billing mainly for telecommunication companies. I graduated from the University of Lille and the Sorbonne in Paris with a Masters and a double Ph.D (in Theoretical Computer Science, and in Philosophy and Epistemology) and I was given the French nationality based on academic merit after 6 years in France. During my years in Paris, I had the chance to live two years at the Swiss Foundation building designed Le Corbusier before moving to the Quartier Latin (because they used to taught latin there in the Middle Ages) becoming a so-called germanopratin living between the Odeon cinema and the Louvre museum on Rue Dauphine for about four years where I spent my time watching French films and writing my thesis at the National Library (BnF). While finishing my first Ph.D I was chosen for a position in open competition and brought to the U.K. by the University of Sheffield as a postdoctoral researcher. Later, I was awarded a distinguished John Templeton Foundation fellowship and grant and joined the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher and faculty member at the Department of Computer Science which has consistently been ranked among the top departments in the area around the world (first in Europe and the U.K.) Soon after I was elected member of the London Mathematical Society and given British citizenship right before becoming founder & director of Oxford Immune Algorithmics. While in the U.K., I joined a computational biology group in Stockholm, Sweden at the Karolinska Institute, the institution that awards one of the Nobel Prizes in science, where I started and co-founded a lab after being the recipient of a prestigious and generous grant by the national research council of Sweden (VR) undertaking cutting-edge research on ways to use and develop fundamental science and core mathematics to better understand the behaviour and to reprogram human cells. I divide most of my time between my homes in Sweden and the U.K. where I live with my wife regularly travelling between London and Stockholm, sometimes even with our cat. I still wear many hats, from being associated to KAUST in Saudi Arabia where I serve as a specialised research consultant to leading the first scientific journal in the U.S. devoted to complex systems. So I've kept ties with all the countries where I've lived in. I also enjoy other unrelated activities. I have taken cooking courses in various places, including Paris (Cordon Bleu), Tokyo (Yuka Mazda and Buddha Bellies Cooking Schools), in Oxford (Raymond Blanc Cookery School) and in London (Le Cordon Bleu), including passing the WSET 1 in Wines by Gastronomica, and the Brookes Cookery and Wine School in Oxford. |  In my Japanese cooking course in Tokyo, Japan (back right). |
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