Manuel Vargas Villanueva obtained in 2001 his PhD. in Computer Science from the University of Seville (Apto Cum Laude). Since 2009, he has been full-time Associate Professor with the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation at the University of Seville.
As a researcher, he currently holds three six-year research terms (until 2019) and one six-year R+D transfer term (until 2019). He is the author of more than 20 publications in international JCR-indexed journals, as well as a number of publications in international conferences with peer review processes and international scientific committees.

He is part of the Research Group Automation, Control and Robotics Engineering (TEP-201) of the Andalusian Research Plan and has taken part as a researcher in 14 relevant research projects, under competitive public funding.

He has made 5 stays in prestigious foreign research centres or universities (amounting for around 9.5 months). The first of them, as a predoctoral researcher, at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The following three, during his postdoctoral period, as a invited researcher, in one of the most prestigious research institutes in France, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), which served to establish links with the ICARE/AROBAS group, under the direction of Prof. Patrick Rives. The most recent stay, as a invited professor of the Departamento de Engenharia Electrônica, at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Dr. M.Vargas conducted his PhD thesis in the field of visual servoing in robotics. Later on, he worked in homography-based image geometry with application to vision-based control with the team of Prof. Patrick Rives at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France. He also has co-authored some publications related to the joint control of gimbaled UAVs. In addition, he has developed part of his research activity in advanced control of industrial systems, having focused more recently on applied optimization. He has supervised one PhD. thesis on the latter subject.