I'm originally from Bilbao. I got both my BSc (in June 1990) and my PhD (in November 1995) in Physics from the University of the Basque Country. In January 1996 I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my first postdoc. Two years later, I moved to Durham University, in northern England, for a second postdoc. Near the end of 1999 I took up a junior lecturer position back in Bilbao. I took leave from there in January 2001 to move to a Fellow position at CERN (the European Lab for Particle Physics, outside Geneva). Since January 2003 I am ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics, Institute of Cosmos Sciences, at Universitat de Barcelona. In 2016 I was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.

Research interests

I try to understand the physical nature of space and time at the most fundamental level. We know since Einstein that, due to the existence of gravity, spacetime is a dynamical entity. So I study the classical and quantum aspects of gravity and its most basic and fascinating objects: the black holes. The natural starting point is the theory of General Relativity and the theories that naturally incorporate the ideas of quantum holographic spacetime, namely, String and M-Theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence.