Born in Tucumán, North West of Argentina, I did my secondary school at Gymnasium UNT. I finished my undergraduate studies in Physics and also a PhD at FaMAF (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina), where I studied the learning and generalization properties of feedforward neural networks.
After obtaining my PhD Thesis in August 2000,   I went as  a  postdoctoral fellow to the Cognitive Neuroscience Sector at SISSA, Trieste (Italy), where I worked with Prof. Alessandro Treves  on neural networks models for facial expression recognition and also on methods based on information theory applied to the analysis of neuronal recordings. In February 2002, I joined the  Oxford group in computational neuroscience where my research focused on understanding the coding used by neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex. In this area of the brain, neurons have a clear and invariant response to objects and faces. I started working in Spain as a fellow  of  the "Ramón y Cajal"  Programme of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, to become Associate professor in 2010. My research line is related to  Computational Intelligence  and its applications to problems in Medicine and Biology. 

[B] J.L. Subirats,  L. Franco and J.M. Jerez. C-Mantec: a novel constructive neural network algorithm incorporating competition between neurons. Neural Networks, 26, pp 130-140, (2012).

[C] J.P. Neirotti and L. Franco. Computational capabilities of multilayer committee machines. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical & Theoretical, 43, 445103, (2010).

[D] J.M. Jerez, I. Molina, P.J. García-Laencina, E. Alba, N. Ribelles, M. Martín and L. Franco. Missing Data Imputation Using Statistical and Machine Learning Methods in a Real Breast Cancer Problem. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 50, pp.105-115, (2010). 

[E] E.T. Rolls, F. Grabenhorst  and L. Franco. Prediction of Subjective Affective State from Brain Activations . Journal of Neurophysiology, 101, pp.1294-1308, (2009).