Joaquín Rapela was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied Computer Science at Universidad de Buenos Aires. He worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center as a software engineer. During his graduate education Joaquín studied Neurosciences, Mathematics, and obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Signal and Image Processing Institue of the Univeristy of Southern California. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience of the University of California San Diego, where he investigated human cognition using electroencephalography (EEG). There he was awarded a seed grant to develop dynamical models and statistical methods to model the activity of ensembles of neurons. He is currently a research associate at the Truccolo Lab for Collective Neural Dynamics & Computation where he studies dysfunctional neural mechanisms in epilepsy using state-of-the-art signal processing and statistical methods.