Carlos was born in 1986 in Nobsa, a small town in the mountains of Colombia. He studied chemical engineering at Osaka University and received his B. Eng. degree in March 2011. He then moved to Switzerland where he obtained his M.S. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in October 2013, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in May 2016 from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His doctoral research, under the guidance of Prof. Xile Hu, was in the coupling of electrocatalysts to photoabsorbers for solar fuels production. After his Ph.D., he joined the group of Prof. Thomas Jaramillo at Stanford University where he was a postdoctoral fellow working on the engineering of catalysts for the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals.
Since November 2018, Carlos has joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering as tenure-track Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.