Rafael was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1993. He was raised in the Netherlands, where he received an international education.

Rafael studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, where he obtained First Class Honours Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees of Engineering. His work during his time in Imperial College was highly varied and included the design, prototype manufacture and evaluation of prosthetic design and prototype manufacture for: below-elbow rowing prosthetics for the British Paralympics team, digital and electronic impedance pneumography systems to non-invasively measure respiratory rate and volume by injecting current into the chest, biological ‘D flip-flop’ logic units implemented in E.Coli bacteria as a precursor to biological computers, and brain-machine interface algorithms to decode hand position in real time from spike train signals obtain via electrodes implanted in the premotor cortex of the brain.

His Master’s project consisted in the design and evaluation, on MATLAB, of adaptive ‘spike-sorting’ algorithms for neurotechnology applications. ‘Spikes’ are neuronal discharges recorded by microelectrodes implanted in the brain, usually in arrays of dozens of individual microelectrodes. The algorithms were able to maintain performance across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios whilst maintaining a low computational cost and remaining largely insensitive (in terms of performance) to change in operation parameter values.

Following his studies, Rafael worked under a temporary contract in Medtronic’s Bakken Research Centre in Maastricht, the Netherlands, as an Associate R&D Engineer, where he was involved in various neurocardiology (i.e. neuromodulation for the prevention of lethal tachyarrhythmia in the hearts of high-risk patients) projects. His responsibilities here ranged from study conception and design, to the processing and evaluation of the physiological signals recorded during such studies.

Since November 2016, Rafael is pursuing his PhD in Paris, France, at LivaNova, in conjunction with Université Paris-Sud. The subject matter of his PhD involves the use of a LivaNova proprietary haemodynamic sensor ‘SonR’ for novel applications: designing and carrying out acute experiments as well as processing the acquired data on platforms such as MATLAB.