Born and raised in Mexico City, I got my bachelor's degree from Oxford University in England (my college was Corpus), in Physics. Interested in how intelligence might work, I then did a master's in Artificial Intelligence at the Univeristy of Edinburgh. But upon concluding the master's, I decided that although AI was pretty cool, it had really very little to do with how actual brains might give rise to intelligence. I therefore started a Ph. D. in Caltech's Computation and Neural Systems program, which I thought would be an excellent way to get into neuroscience (and indeed it was). My thesis was all about spike train cross-correlations (see papers 1,3, and 4).
When I graduated, I moved back to Mexico City, and joined Ranulfo Romo's awake monkey lab. I became interested in short-term memory there (see paper 2), an interest and a collaboration that is an ongoing one. While in Mexico, I compiled a list of cool papers from a variety of scientific friends. The list was to be used for teaching a seminar, and is a few years old now, but it is still a really interesting read! After my two years in Mexico, I spent a year in Tony Movshon's lab at NYU, but in fact ended up spending a significant chunk of that time working with my ex-Ph.D.-advisor, John Hopfield, who had moved to Princeton. Tony was very nice about it, and other than a couple of characteristically biting sarcastic remarks, didn't seem much to mind. John and I together worked on a somewhat infamously provocative project, which we playfully called Mus silicium (see papers 5 and 6).
While at NYU, I was recruited by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I arrived as Assistant Prof. in January of 2001. My lab's web page, which describes the lab's current interests, is here. The lab is in expansion mode! Click if you are interested in postdoc or graduate study opportunities.