At INTA he has been Principal Investigator and National Project Manager for the Spanish collaboration within MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument on board of the next space telescope, JWST. Previously, he has been director of the Spanish-German Center has conducted research as postdoc in the theoretical department of the ``Universidad Autónoma de Madrid'', the ``Max-Plank Institut fur Astronomie'' in Heidelberg (MPIA, Germany) and the ``Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics'' in Cambridge (USA) as Fulbright Fellow, where he finished his PhD dissertation, initiated at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has hold some of the most prestigious fellowships, such as: Fulbright scientist, a NASA/NSF fellowships, and a contract by the Ramón y Cajal program. Among his research topics focuses on the search and characterization of the properties of substellar objects and properties of stars in open clusters. In particular, he has studied aspects such as the initial mass function, trying to extend the census well inside the substellar domain, the searches of ultra-cool dwarfs, censuses of accretion and protoplanetary disks, analysis of their properties, properties of young stars and the evolution with time (disks, rotation, lithium abundance, activity) and so on. From a more general perspective, he has specialized in stellar and planetary system formation, using different observational techniques: from optical to far infrared, imaging and spectroscopy, ground-based (Magellan, CAHA, WHT, TNG, Keck, Subaru, IRTF, UKIRT, La Silla, Las Campanas, KPNO, CTIO, CSO) and space-borne telescopes (ISO, Akari, Spitzer, Herschel, Kepler). All this observational effort has produced more than 200 articles in well-know journals such A and A, ApJ, AJ, Science and MNRAS, with a significant impact (H factor=64). He has published several books about science for the general public.