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Diego is a Doctoral candidate at the Power & Flow section of the Mechanical Engineering department at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He is a highly committed researcher with a clear focus on finding concrete solutions to current renewable energy needs, essential to the survival of complex life forms.

He has experience conducting research experimentally and numerically. Starting in rural communities in the highlands of Guatemala, searching for solutions to the low-efficiency combustion technologies of the impoverished people using the "Community Based Participatory Research" methodology, followed up by proposing and investigating a novel biomass reactor using highly detailed numerical models of reacting flow.

He is currently working in the van Oijen group, performing Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) to understand the fundamental physics of Hydrogen combustion in an Argon atmosphere as part of the Argon Power Cycle (APC) project, a technology with outstanding efficiency aimed at clean power conversion to replace fossil fuels.

Diego received his professional engineering degree in Energy Systems, from Universidad Galileo (Guatemala) after creating a novel hydrogen stove powered with solar energy, focused on replacing low-efficiency biomass combustion technologies. He followed up with a MSc in Mechanical Engineering at the Delft University of Technology,  where he invented the Kulkan reactor, a novel biomass gasifier-burner with heat recovery and improved combustion to address the energy needs of people living in poverty.

He has been awarded a number of prizes, including, Best Young Biomass Researcher (Austria, 2020), Dutch CleanTech Challenge (2019, Netherlands), TUDelft Ideation Contest (2019, Netherlands), Presidential Medal of the Environment (2015, Guatemala), Greenovators (2014, Costa Rica).