Before that he was the chair in Complexity Science, and full professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom.

Between 1985 and 1990, he studied chemical sciences at the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara, Cuba, where he obtained his degree in only 4 of the 5 years established for the program.

In the first years after graduation, Estrada investigated on the organic synthesis and the use of spectroscopy for the characterization of new chemical entities with pharmacological activity.

[1] In 1997, he obtained his PhD in Mathematical chemistry under the direction of Luis A. Montero Cabrera on the topic of "Graph Theory Applied to Molecular Design".

His generalization of the discrete Laplace operator, as the d-path Laplacians and their transforms,[8] has opened several new avenues for studying long-range interactions in network dynamics.