[5] Velarde has worked in American and European universities and research organizations, focusing on fluid dynamics and other non-linear problems, including the kinetic and thermodynamic theories, hydrodynamic and interfacial instabilities, anharmonic lattices and electronics.

[1] In 1965 he left the JEN, married María del Pilar Ibarz Gil and decided to work for a PhD degree.

Influenced by Ilya Prigogine, he ended up getting two PhD degrees, one in 1968 at the Complutense University of Madrid and another in 1970 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, which allowed him to work both in the Spanish academic world and abroad.

[1][2] Back in Spain, in 1971 Velarde started to teach and research at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he created the Department of Fluid Physics.

[10] Throughout his career, García Velarde has held visiting or invited positions at the universities of Paris-Sud, Pierre and Marie Curie, London, Aix-Marseille, Grenoble, Huazhong, Sofia, Stanford, Cambridge, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Libre de Bruxelles, Norwegian of Science and Technology and East China Normal, apart from institutions such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre and the International Center for Mechanical Sciences, of which he was rector from 2002 to 2004.