About Me

I am an assistant professor working for the Physics department at San Diego State University. I firmly believe in the educational value of having hands on experience with scientific research for undergrad or graduate student. I am constantly looking for new ways to involve my students in my research. My research interests include nucleon-nucleon interactions, nuclear reactions, density functional theory and chiral effective field theories. Also, I'm particularly interested on uncertainty quantification (UQ) of nuclear structure and nuclear reaction calculations stemming from statistical and systematic errors of the nucleon-nucleon interaction.

Before coming to San Diego I was a postdoc at the Physics and Astronomy department at Ohio University under the guidance of Daniel Phillips and Charlotte Elster. Over there I collaborated with different members of the department in research and teaching. My research there focused in part in the statistical analysis of low energy elastic scattering of lightly bound and heavy nuclei and its impact on what is known as the Coulomb threshold anomaly.

Previously, I was postdoc at the Nuclear Data and Theory Group from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working with Nicolas Schunck. My research there focused on nuclear density functional theory (DFT) calculations of light, medium and heavy nuclei. In particular, the implementation of microscopically constrained energy density functionals. That work was funded by the US Department of Energy through the NUCLEI project from SciDAC.

I'm a member of the Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics, the FRIB Theory Alliance and the research group on Nuclear and Hadronic Physics at Intermediate Energies, or just Hadrónica.

I did my doctoral thesis at Universidad de Granada under the supervision of Enrique Ruiz Arriola and José Enrique Amaro Soriano. My thesis included the analysis of over 8000 scattering data in order to implement nucleon-nucleon interactions and estimate their corresponding statistical and systematic uncertainties. That work was possible thanks to funding by the National Science and Technology Council of México through its graduate studies scholarships program, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport of Spain and the Junta de Andalucía.

I studied the Physics and Mathematics Master at Universidad de Granada. My research work consisted on the application of boundary conditions to solve the problem of hypercritical fields and was done under the tutorship of Enrique Ruiz Arriola.

I did my undergraduate studies in Physics at Universidad de las Américas Puebla. My thesis topics included the study of a spin-2 field through string theory. My advisor was Roberto Cartas Fuentevilla from Instituto de Física Luis Rivera Terrazas of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.

My first research work was done at the University of Notre Dame as a part of the undergraduate research program. I worked with Henryk Mach in measuring the lifetime of ¹³⁴Sb.

You can look at my complete cv with a full list of publications