He was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics in 2007 by the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer studying the evolutionary conservation of folds in proteins.

During his tenure at the Wellcome Sanger Institute he initially focused on the development of integration and visualisation tools for interpretation of Copy Number Variation datasets.

The BioJS community is the greatest effort to date in the provision of open source web components for biological visualisation.

[17][18][19] BioJS involves efforts from world leading resources such as the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Berkeley Lab, Cambridge University and others.

During his time as ELIXIR Technical coordinator he has been involved in the development of best practices and standardised metrics to measure the impact of data resources across Europe.

Manuel has over 50 peer reviewed scientific publications to his name,[24] and a book Perfect DNA,[25] in which he explores the wider issues beyond the science of genetic sequencing.