Astronomer

Born in Elgueta (Guipúzcoa) in 1950. Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the Universidad de Valencia since 1991 and research lecturer on the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

He studied physics at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews. He graduated from in Zaragoza in 1975. He holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has worked at the Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn, at the central laboratories of Siemens AG in Munich and at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía.
He was a consultant to Nasa (1983-85). He co-founded the Sociedad Española de Astronomía, of which he was vice-president and president. He helped foster the creation of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department at the Universidad de Valencia, and was its first director. He was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a guest astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris.

He was a member of the advisory panel of the ASI/AWR of NATO, a member of the European VLBI Program Committee, a member of the European Space Agency's Very Low Frequency Array Science Team, a member of Division X, Commission 40 of the International Astronomical Union, and has sat on several committees of the European Commission. He has directed summer schools at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and at the Universidad del País Vasco.
He is the author of three patents and director of the astronomy park in Tolosa, and the stellarium in San Sebastian. He has directed 9 PhD theses and has published around 180 international articles: about a hundred in leading journals such as Nature and Science, and the others in books and contributions to conferences.
He is a specialist in the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), has made pioneering and essential contributions to high-precision differential radio astrometry and to the study of supernovae. HE has also made groundbreaking contributions to the field of VLBI in millimetric waves, gravitational lenses, studies of the peculiar quasar 4C39.25, study of the galactic centre, etc.

He has given over 20 guest lectures at leading university and research centres in Europe and the US. He co-chaired the world's largest conference on supernova explosions and the first meeting of Spanish radio astronomy, and consequently co-edited the proceedings. He is the author of the educational book “El gran viaje de los inkokerones”.
In 2004 he received the Euskadi Prize for Research.
Since February 2003 he has been a permanent member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales.
He currently works at the department of astronomy and astrophysics and at the astronomy observatory, both of the Universidad de Valencia, and is a member of the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Sociedad Española de Astronomía and the Real Sociedad Española de Física.

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