Alex Mira obtained an honour distinction for his BSc in Biology at the University of Alicante, Spain, in 1994. He then obtained a British Council scholarship to do a Master of Science degree at Oxford University (UK) and was the first Spanish student to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship, which allowed him to do his doctorate at Oxford on bacterial genetics, which he finished in 1999.

He then was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to carry out post-doctoral research in the USA in the field of bacterial genomics for 2 and a half years, and a second post-doc at Uppsala University (Sweden) working on microarray technology and bioinformatics.

After 9 years abroad, he returned to Spain with the Ramón y Cajal repatriation program in 2003 and initiated his own research group working on the genomics and metagenomics of oral bacteria.

In 2009, he was awarded the “Jaime Ferran” National Award for Research in Microbiology and he is currently the principal investigator of the Oral Microbiome Laboratory at the CSISP, in Spain, where he has applied metagenomics and next-generation sequencing technology to the study of dental caries, discovering the presence of bacteria which prevent the formation of cavities, as well as to the study of bacteria from breast milk, saliva, and the respiratory tract.