Currently at the University of South Carolina Physics and Astronomy Department and USC Nanocenter, I work as a Research Assistant Professor in close collaboration with Seagate Technology in the area of spin momentum transfer devices. In my "spare" time I work on shot noise in magnetic tunnel junctions, when my curiosity doesn't drag me into other people's projects, such as Au-thiol magnetism, and InN nanowires/nanonetworks. I spend my days up and down the Nanocenter hallway between Prof. Thomas Crawford's optics lab and Prof. Richard Webb's low temperature and mesoscopic physics lab.

I was born in Bogota (Colombia), high in the Andes mountains (2600 meters, sorry but I prefer SI units). My native tongue is Spanish but I was taught English at school since I was six. After finishing high school and going to mandatory military service for a year, I majored in Physics from Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota, in the area of Chaos under the supervision of Profs. Philippe Binder and Thomas Dittrich. I taught high school physics for three years, and experimental physics for two years at the university (during my major). I then spent a month at Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, working on quantum chaos, and decided to start a PhD in the United States. I got my PhD in Physics from University of Maryland, College Park, in January 2005, under the supervision of Prof. Richard Webb in the general area of mesoscopic and low temperature physics. My research concentrated on nonlocal spin injection and detection via transport and magnetic force microscopy.