Manuel studied Biotechnology in the University of Zaragoza, Spain, where he graduated with honours. On his last year, he did an Erasmus at the lab of Marie-Luce Bochallon-Piallatin in the University of Geneva, where he did his bachelor thesis on circadian expression of genes in smooth muscle cells (with actin isoforms among others). In Geneva he met Marcos González-Gaitán, and had the chance to join his lab for his Biochemistry Master thesis. As a consequence of his research project, he created a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to analyse the distribution of Antxr2a, an actin binding protein, that determines the direction of cell division during zebrafish development.

After reading François Nédélec’s publications, Cytosim, a simulation of the cytoskeleton created in Nédélec’s group, captivated him. During his project in Nédélec's lab, he intends to develop a mathematical model that will be able to reproduce experimental observations and help understand the important functional aspects that are experimentally studied by other partners of the DivIDE network.