Biologist, obtained his PhD in Molecular Genetics at the University of Barcelona (UB). Currently, he is a CSIC Research Scientist at the National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB), in Madrid, since 1997, after two postdoctoral periods in Heidelberg (DKFZ) and Barcelona (UAB). Since 2007, he joined the Spanish Research Initiative on Rare Diseases (CIBERER-ISCIII) and currently he is a member of its Steering Committee. He has been Honorary Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) for 20 years (1998-2018), and, since 2007, is the Director of the Spanish node of the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA/INFRAFRONTIER).

He has always been working with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and, since 1991, within the field of animal transgenesis. At the CNB, he leads a research team interested in basic science, to understand the mechanisms controlling gene expression, and in applied biomedical science, generating animal models for the study of human rare diseases, such as albinism. He has pioneered the use of CRISPR genome-editing tools in vivo in Spain and contributed to the dissemination of these techniques.

He has published more than 124 scientific articles and co-invented 6 patents in the field.

He is the current President of the European Society for Pigment Cell Research (ESPCR) and of the Association for the Responsible Research and Innovation in Genome Editing (ARRIGE) and serves at the boards of additional international (IFPCS) and national (SEBBM, SEG) societies. In 2006, he founded the International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT) for which he served as President until 2014. He is the President of the CSIC Ethics Committee and a member of the Ethics Panel of ERC in Brussels. He has received several awards for his research contributions and outreach activities.