As a result of my innate curiosity, I started my career as a Senior Telecommunications Engineer at the University of the Basque Country, obtaining it in May 2003. Then, in November of the same year I was awarded one of the 32 doctoral fellowships of the Foundation of Technological Centers I˜naki Goenaga (by academic record) for pursuing my doctoral thesis at the Center for Technical Studies and Research of Gipuzkoa (CEIT). I defended my doctoral thesis in Telecommunications (Cum Laude) from the University of Navarra in 2006. During my predoctoral and postdoctoral period I combined my research work with teaching tasks as an assistant professor (2003-2005), acting professor (2006) and associate professor (2007) at the University of Navarra (Spain). From August to December 2007 I made a postdoctoral stay at the University of Delaware (Newark, DE, USA). In 2008, I joined the Robotiker Foundation (currently integrated in TECNALIA) as a senior scientific researcher at the TELECOM Unit. During this time, I began to specialize in applied Artificial Intelligence, culminating in a second doctoral thesis in Information Technologies (Cum Laude and Extraordinary Doctoral Award) by the University of Alcal´a de Henares in 2013. I am currently Research Professor in Artificial Intelligence of the OPTIMA (Optimization, Modeling and Data Analytics) area of TECNALIA (www.tecnalia.com, http://jrlab.science), position from which I lead and coordinate the activity research and development of this area of 28 people. I am also a Professor in the Department of Communications Engineering of the University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV), an external scientific researcher (by invitation) of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM, www.bcamath.org) and a Distiguished Visiting Professor at the University of Granada. My research activity focuses on the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques and models (including Deep learning, meta-heuristic optimization, Soft Computing and related paradigms) for solving problems related to energy distribution networks (Smart Grids), Renewable Energy, Telecommunications, Industry, Health and Mobility & Smart Transport, among many other fields and application sectors. I have been the recipient for two occasions of the Torres Quevedo program of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (2007 & 2009). I am a Senior member of IEEE, and I have been awarded as “Bizkaia Talent” for my experience and scientific-technological career. I serve as an associate editor of leading journals in my two fields of expertise: Telecommunications (Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing), ITS (IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems) and Artificial Intelligence (Information Fusion, Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, Cognitive Computation, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Artificial Intelligence, Memetic Computing). Together with another 10 recognized experts, I have participated in the drafting of Spain’s National Artificial Intelligence R&&I Strategy, which will drive national research and transfer funding programs for the next few years. I have recently achieved the Full Professorship ("Catedrático de Universidad") accreditation by the Spanish ANECA external agency for professorship evaluation.