I joined Drexel after spending eleven years as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prior to that, I lived and worked in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Madrid, Spain, where I worked briefly as a primary care doctor. I was born in a Spanish colony in Africa. A job at the World Health Organization headquarters in Washington, D.C. brought me to the United States, where I have been living since 1989.

My research and teaching has focused on the intersection of public health, economic issues and social science. One of my primary areas of interest has been the crises and fluctuations of the economy and the relation between these fluctuations and health conditions. My research on issues of political economy has appeared in the book "La Gran Recesión y el capitalismo del siglo XXI" (coauthored with Rolando Astarita, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires), as well as in publications on the dynamics of capital accumulation, the causes of the Great Recession and other topics. I also have a strong interest in environmental issues, as reflected in book chapters and papers on the economic aspects of climate change and several articles in the journals Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and Environmental Science and Policy.

Besides research articles, I sometimes write journalistic pieces, generally on economic or political issues, though I also like to produce ramblings on music. I have often translated technical texts and sometimes poetry from other languages into Spanish. Three authors I have particularly enjoyed translating into Spanish are Primo Levi, Stephan Brecht and Ondra Lysohorsky.

I consider myself a social researcher and believe that social knowledge is at a level of development where disciplinary boundaries are quite irrelevant for scientific purposes. It seems to me present day social science disciplines are related to scientific social knowledge in a similar way as alchemy was related to modern chemistry.