I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Granada. I am interested in
different emergent phenomena arising in soft matter systems such as dynamic collective behavior and self-organization.
In particular, my research covers different topics in the field of disordered systems, including glasses, gels, and living
matter systems.
I obtained my PhD in Physics from the University of Granada (2011) under the supervision of Prof. Jose Callejas. During
this time I gained a solid knowledge in complex fluids, in particular in the use of light scattering techniques and
theoretical models to study aggregation and phase transitions in colloidal systems. My career is marked by a large
mobility through different top institutions along Europe, where I have had (and still have) the privilege of working with
exceptional scientists and the pleasure of supervising promising students. In this respect, I completed my doctoral
education with Prof. Walter Kob at the Laboratoire Charles Coulomb (CNRS), Montpellier (France). There I received an
extensive education in computer simulations and was engaged in projects that were on the leading edge of the glass
transition field. Hired by a project of the European Research Council (ERC), I worked for more than two years as a
postdoc in the Department of Physics at La Sapienza-Università di Roma (Italy) under the supervision of Prof. Francesco
Sciortino, who provided me with a ground-breaking expertise in theoretical soft-matter physics. After my time in Roma, I
moved to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (Dresden, Germany) where I worked for three
years as an independent guest scientist in the Division of Biological Physics. There I shared my research activities with
the supervision of young researchers and the teaching of short courses on statistical and computational physics. I came
back to the University of Granada in 2019 with an individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. After this fellowship, I
became Associate Professor in 2021.
I have contributed to several investigations in different fields using theoretical, computational, and experimental
approaches. This includes work on phase transitions in disordered systems, colloidal aggregation, stabilized complex
suspensions, computational design of soft materials, magnetic nanoparticles, light scattering techniques, stochastic
processes, fractal geometry, and numerical methods. Some of my computational studies have indeed inspired an intense
experimental work, e.g. the realization of novel soft materials with unconventional properties using DNA constructs or the
detection of collective long-range correlations in colloidal glassy systems.
I have presented several contributed talks at international conferences and been invited lecturer in many prestigious
institutions. For instance, the University of California-Berkeley (USA), different Max Planck Institutes (Germany), the
University of Potsdam (Germany), the University of Bristol (UK), or, in Spain, the Complutense University of Madrid and
the University of Barcelona. Part of my research has also been published in high impact factor journals of distinct
disciplines such as Nature Physics, Physical Review X, or Nanoscale. I am also a frequent reviewer for different
international journals, e.g. Physical Review (X, Letters, and E), Soft Matter, or Journal of Chemical Physics. I have
obtained competitive individual funding from international institutions such as the Visitors Program of the Max Planck
Society (January 2016-December 2018), and have been awarded the Individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship by
the European Commission (June 2019-May 2021).
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