I was born in Córdoba, Argentina, and graduated in physics in 1985 from Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina. In 1986 I moved to Germany for my PhD at the Max-Planck Institute FKF in Stuttgart with Prof. M. Cardona, which I finished in 1989. It followed a two-years postdoc at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, USA, and back to the MPI Stuttgart for three years. In 1996 I switched to the Technical University of Berlin for an appointment as Research & Teaching Associate. In 1999 I was awarded the Karl-Scheel Prize of the Physical Society of Berlin for my contributions to the field of high-pressure semiconductor physics. In November 2003 I became ICREA Research Professor and joined the Optoelectronic Properties of Nanostructured Materials group at ICMAB-CSIC. I created a facility for optical spectroscopy with micro and nanometer-scale resolution and I further set up a laboratory for high-pressure physics. I am also leading the group activities on thermoelectricity.