More About Me

Some more details about my life and career.

Short Biography

I was born on a Wednesday at the México Hospital in San José, the capital of Costa Rica. My father is an electrical engineer who worked almost 40 years for the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE), and my mother runs her own business since 1997. I attended primary school and high-school from 1990 to 2000, and I then decided to study electronic engineering, maybe driven by my constant curiosity and passion for building things and making them work.

In 2005, I received the Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in electronic engineering after five years of programming, designing and implementing analog and digital circuits. My final project, developed alongside my friend William Ramírez Orozco and supervised by Lic. Adriano Espinosa Carreira, was an automatic control system for electrical appliances at home, which was remotely operated using a telephone-based interface.

I then got interested in digital signal processing and decided to further explore the subject as a postgraduate student. I completed the program in 2010 and received the Master of Science degree (M.Sc.) in electrical engineering. My thesis dealed with audio restoration (reduction of hiss and clicks) using a novel thresholding approach of the wavelet coefficients. During that period, I had the fortune to be supervised by Dr Jorge A. Romero Chacón. Also important were the audio recordings I was working with, which consisted of several old shellac records containing music by Costa Rican composer Julio Fonseca Gutiérrez. All these historical recordings had not been listened for more than 50 years. The music was restored, transfered to modern digital formats and donated to the music archive of the University of Costa Rica (UCR).

Later on, in 2011, I started working as a full-time lecturer and researcher at the University of Costa Rica, after being appointed coordinator of the electrical engineering program at campus Liberia. Linear circuits, analog electronics, and computer architecture are among the topics I use to lecture, and my students are mostly originals of the Guanacaste province. I got tenured in 2014, supported by most of my colleagues, and quickly started looking for opportunities to continue my studies abroad.

From 2015 to 2020, I conducted my doctoral research in the Department of Electronic Engineering, at the University of York (United Kingdom). My supervisor was Dr John E. Szymanski, probably the best supervisor ever, and my research project concentrated on developing an iterative semi-supervised audio source separation process for harmonic or nearly-harmonic sounds. This reasearch also involved other areas such as multiple fundamental frequency estimation, spectral filtering, sinusoidal synthesis of sounds and optimisation strategies applied to the separation of overlapping harmonics. My studies in England were kindly founded by the University of Costa Rica and the Costa Rican Ministry of Science and Technology (MICITT).

In March 2020, I came back to Costa Rica and started working once again as a full-time lecturer and researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Campus Guanacaste. My responsabilities now include lecturing general topics in electronics and computer sciences, developing research projects in signal processing and acoustics, and the management of the electrical engineering program.

Prizes and Awards