- Ph.D., 1995 — EMBL, Hedelberg, Germany and Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain
- M.S., 1991 — Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain
- B.S., 1989 — University of Alcala de Henares, Spain
- Biophysics
- Quantitative and synthetic biology
- Protein folding, evolution and design
- Protein engineering
- Optical spectroscopy
- Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR)
- Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)
- Laser spectroscopy and ultrafast kinetics
- Single molecule fluorescence
- Statistical mechanics
- Computational chemistry and biology
Our research group has a wet laboratory fully equipped for molecular biology, biochemistry and protein chemistry applications including high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) instrument for large scale protein and peptide purification, freeze-dry system, large scale shaker-incubators, floor preparative centrifuge and ultracentrifuge, PCR instrument. In addition our group has two dry laboratories equipped for molecular and single molecule spectroscopy, including: 1) UV absorbance spectrophotometer; 2) steady state fluorometer equipped with automatic temperature control, polarizers for anisotropy measurements, single photon counting detection, sub picoMolar detection limit, and time resolved module for fluorescence lifetime determination; 3) high resolution circular dichroism spectrophotometer for determination of protein and nucleic acid secondary structure, equipped with temperature control; 4) stopped flow instrument for kinetic mixing experiments with 1 millisecond resolution and equipped with fluorescence, absorbance and circular dichroism detection; 5) custom-built continuous flow microfluidics instrument for rapid kinetic mixing experiments (50 microsecond resolution) equipped with fluorescence detection; 6) custom built total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) single-molecule microscope; 7) custom built confocal single-molecule fluorescence microscope equipped with four detection channels with single-photon counting picosecond resolution; 8) Fianium supercontinuum white laser for multicolor excitation with picosecond resolution and multiple light outputs, which serves as fluorescence excitation source for the confocal and TIRF single-molecule microscopes as well as the lifetime fluoremeter.
We are users of the high-resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) facility at UC Merced, which includes a Bruker Avance III 600 MHz instrument and a Varian 500 MHz instrument and we also use the high-resolution NMR facility at UC Berkeley, which includes several Bruker instruments operating at various field strengths (600 MHz, at 700 MHz, at 800 MHz and at 900 MHz). Finally, we are also users of high performance computing (HPC) capabilities existing at UC Merced and elsewhere.
