I graduated in physics in 1985 from the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, for which I was granted one of 30 yearly fellowships, competing with students from all over the country. In 1986 I moved to Germany for my PhD at the Max-Planck Institute FKF in Stuttgart with Prof. M. Cardona, which I finished in 1989. It followed a two-years postdoc at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, USA, working with A. Pinczuk pursuing pioneer research on elementary excitations (e.g. plasmons) of 1D electron gases formed in GaAs quantum wires. After the postdoc I went back to the MPI Stuttgart for three years. In 1996 I switched to the Technical University of Berlin for an appointment as Research & Teaching Associate. I performed there my Habilitation as Privat Dozent in June 1998. I was awarded the Karl-Scheel Prize of the Physical Society of Berlin for my contributions to the field of high-pressure semiconductor physics in 1999. In November 2003 I joined the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) for a permanent appointment as ICREA Research Professor. At ICMAB I created a facility for optical spectroscopy with micro and nanometer-scale resolution and set up a laboratory for high-pressure physics.