I am originally from Bilbao. I obtained my BSc (June 1990) and PhD (November 1995) in Physics from the University of the Basque Country. In January 1996 I moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my first postdoctoral position, followed by a second postdoc at Durham University in the UK. Toward the end of 1999, I returned to Bilbao to take up a junior lectureship, before taking leave in January 2001 to join CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) as a Fellow. Since January 2003, I have been an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences, Universitat de Barcelona. I was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2016, and in 2022 I received the Medalla Monturiol and was elected Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG).

I seek to uncover the physical nature of space and time at the most fundamental level. Building on Einstein’s insight that gravity makes spacetime a dynamical entity, I investigate gravity in both its classical and quantum regimes, with a central focus on its most elementary and fascinating objects: black holes. Starting from General Relativity, my work extends to frameworks that realize quantum holographic spacetime, namely String and M-theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence.