When I finished my studies of Agriculture Engineering and after one year working in a private company, I started my scientific career as a PhD student at IRTA, thanks to a CIRIT scholarship. During my PhD studies I also finished my MSc in Food Technology and some years later the MSc in Psychology. I did the PhD courses at the Department of Statistics and Operative Investigation of the UPC. With my PhD Thesis I worked on sensory analysis and boar taint and I used advanced statistic methodologies. I won the Extraordinary Award on Mathematics. During my PhD I carried out stages at the Meat and Livestock Commission in Milton Keynes (UK), ID-DLO in Lelystad (NL) and at Best Foods Europe R&D in Heilbronn (DE) learning about sensory science and statistics.

When I finished the PhD I started with a contract at IRTA on EUPIGCLASS EU project about pig carcass grading. This project has been very important in my scientific career because it has introduced me to specific statistical techniques, very useful in carcass classification. Also, in this project I was introduced to the CT technology and its image analysis. During this project, I met most of the scientist that work in pig carcass grading in EU and I am still in contact with them in the EU expert group. Furthermore, I did two short stages, one at the Institut Technique du Porc (IFIP) in Rennes (FR) and another at the SFK-Technology in Herlev (DK) and Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Foulum (DK) working mainly in statistics. From this work, I participated as co-author in the “Statistical handbook for assessing pig grading methods”.

When I finished this contract, I obtained a post-doc INIA-CCAA for 4 years working on new technologies at IRTA. After I obtained a permanent position as researcher at IRTA in the Product Quality Program and since 2016 I am the head of the program. I participated in several EU and national projects and contracts mainly about carcass and meat quality, boar taint, consumer studies and carcass classification. Within one of these projects (QPG), I carried out a short stay at the University of Cambridge working in the analysis of microarrays data.

In 2006 IRTA bought a CT, I did the course to become a supervisor and developed the project to sign it up as radioactive installation at the Consejo de Seguridad Nacional. Recently a mobile CT unit has been financed through an infrastructure project I was responsible for.

During July 12 to July 13 I took a sabbatical/post-doc year at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, in the Centre of Sherbrooke (Canada) working in “Developing a new numerical approach for automatic virtual dissection and the precise estimation of weight, lean, fat and bone in pig carcass cuts” among other subjects. For this stage I enjoyed and OECD scholarship for 6 months. The Cost Action FAIM “Optimising and standardising non-destructive imaging and spectroscopic methods to improve the determination of body composition and meat quality in farm animals” has been very important in my scientific career. I was the leader of one working group and I met most of the EU researcher that work with CT and Imaging techniques. Nowadays I am a leader of a work package of the Cost Action IPEMA “Innovative approaches in pork production with entire males”.

In a mid to long term my scientific technical interests are continue working, improve and innovate with of CT technology, advanced statistical techniques and also in meat quality, boar taint and consumer studies, considering sustainability aspects.