In 1984 he graduated in mathematics from the Universidad del País Vasco-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV-EHU) before obtaining his PhD from this university in 1987, receiving the Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievements for both.

[5] He has developed intensive international work having led co-operation programmes with various Latin American countries, as well as with Portugal, the Maghreb, China and Iran, amongst others.

He has managed the Mathematics Programme (2001–2004) of the Spanish National Research Plan and directed and participated in various international panels belonging of the French CNRS, ANR, IUF, AERES and INRIA and the German DFG amongst other agencies.

He is a member of the Scientific Committee of various Institutes such as the CUMP in Porto, Portugal [4], CERFACS in Toulouse [5], the Pedro Pascual de Benasque Science Center [6] and the UNESCO "Mathematics and Development," Chair co-ordinated by M.Jaoua.

In the period 2009-2015 he run, in cooperation with the journalist Xabier Lapitz a Radio Program at Onda Vasca on various topics related to Mathematics, Higher Education and Research.

He received his award from His Majesty, the King on 15 January 2008 together with the other 2007 prize-winners (Ignacio Cirac Saturain, Carlos Duarte Quesada, Luis A. Oro Giral and Daniel Ramón Vidal).

His paper "On the optimality of the observability inequalities for parabolic and hyperbolic systems with potentials", in collaboration with Thomas Duyckaerts and Xu Zhang, published in Ann.

In 2014 he got the Doctor Honoris Causa degree from the Université de Lorraine in France [10] and in 2015 he became a member of Academia Europaea and the First Ambassador of Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg.

In 2022, he received the SIAM W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize for fundamental theoretical and computational contributions to the Control, Numerics and Analysis of nonlinear PDEs and multi-physical systems with impactful scientific and industrial applications.