Since August 2015, Álvaro (Aranjuez, 1980) has been a Permanent Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Previously, awarded a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (2010, Summa cum Laude) on theoretical and observational constraints in extended theories of gravity.  Álvaro’s publications include more than 60 peer-reviewed articles with seminal contributions in the areas of cosmological large-scale structures, foundations of theories beyond Einsteinian gravity and indirect methods of dark matter detections. Álvaro is also a scientific referee for twenty-two journals and several international scientific agencies and has been responsible for enabling several MSc and PhD students to graduate. To date, Álvaro has been member of the scientific teams for seventeen research funded projects. Since 2016 he has been has been the Principal Investigator (PI) for eight funded research projects in both Europe and South Africa. In 2017 he was appointed as an Associate in the SKA Cosmology collaboration and took the Chair of the departmental Internationalisation Committee (Mathematics, UCT). Then he was honoured with the Young Researcher Award, (UCT College of Fellows, 2017) and the Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award for Early-career Researchers (2018). Since 2019, he is the President of the Society of Spanish Researchers in Southern Africa (ACE Sur de Africa).