He holds a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Seville (1992) and a PhD from the same university (1998) after defending his doctoral thesis entitled "The Microbiota of the Dead Sea: 50 Years Later," supervised by A. Ventosa. During his predoctoral training, he completed short stays at the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Forsyth Dental Center, Boston (Massachusetts, USA) with B.J. Paster and F.E. Dewhirst (1995), and at the Department of Microbiology at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) with H.K. Schleifer and W. Ludwig (1996). In addition, in 1995, he participated in the summer course "Microbial Diversity" at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole (Massachusetts, USA). A postdoctoral fellowship allowed him to stay at the TUM (Germany) for two more years. Upon returning to Spain, he worked at the University of Seville and at the Valencian Institute of Agricultural Research (Valencia). In 2004, he was awarded a contract under the Ramón y Cajal program, which allowed him to join the University of Valencia, where he has developed his career and reached the level of Professor.

His research activity in his early years encompassed the study of extreme and moderate halophilic microorganisms (archaea and bacteria) while currently, he focuses primarily on marine bacteria. Nevertheless, throughout his career, he has worked with many other physiological and taxonomic groups: lactic acid bacteria, phytopathogenic bacteria, freshwater bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, thermophilic bacteria, actinomycetes, and symbionts. The focus of this work is primarily taxonomic, having described more than one hundred taxa of prokaryotes, but also encompassing aspects such as phylogenetic analysis, microbial diversity and ecology, the development of identification and detection methods, comparative genomics, strain conservation, biotechnological potential, food safety, and pathogenesis. He has even addressed social aspects in the field of prokaryotic nomenclature, specifically the analysis of gender bias in the formation of eponymous names (those that honor individuals).