Rafael Palacios was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1966. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from the ICAI School of Engineering, Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid, in 1990, and a Ph.D. degree from Comillas Pontifical University in 1998. He joined the ICAI School of Engineering as an Assistant Professor and the Institute for Research in Technology as a Researcher in 1998. He obtained Tenure in 2004 and became a Full Professor in 2020. He has been the Head of the Programs in telecommunications engineering and computer science from 2012 to 2024. He also helped create the Master’s program in cybersecurity and was the coordinator from 2019 to 2021. His areas of research include advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence applied to a wide array of fields, including anomaly detection, image processing and GIS, cybersecurity and privacy, telemedicine, aviation safety, etc. He is a frequent Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, where he carried out research with the Sloan School of Management (2001-02 and 2024-25), the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2009-10), and the MIT Energy Initiative (2017-18).