A tenured lecturer in the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Barcelona (UB), he teaches Physics and Astrophysics and has supervised PhD theses. He is also director of the University of Barcelona Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICC-UB/IEEC). His professional career has been in the field of space missions, especially the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency, which will produce a 3D map of our galaxy with more than a thousand million stars, a project for which he was one of the proponents. He is a member of the executive committee of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) and is joint head researcher in the Barcelona Gaia group. He enjoys popularising science as a speaker, author of articles and books, and also as a member of the Big Van Science group. Since 2013 he has been a founder-member of the data services company DAPCOM SL, a spin-off from UB and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), in which he is a scientific consultant and business adviser.