José Mijares was born and raised in Venezuela, and received his PhD diploma in Mathematics in July 2007 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He also has a Master’s degree from the Universidad Simón Bolívar (Venezuela). José arrived to the USA in 2013 and currently works at the University of Denver, Colorado. From September 2013 to June 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Denver, under the supervision of Natasha Dobrinen. He also was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas, under the supervision of Carlos Di Prisco.

As a PhD student, he had the opportunity to visit the Department of Mathematics of the University of Toronto for almost 8 months in 2005, working under the supervision of Stevo Todorcevic. As a result of all these experiences, he has a strong training in set theory, mathematical logic, topology, Ramsey theory, analysis and both finite and infinite combinatorics. He has taught in the Universidad Central de Venezuela and in the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia). He had the opportunity to speak in renowned institutions like the University of California, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Florida at Gainesville, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the Fields Institute (Canada), the University of Toronto (Canada), the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA, Brazil), the Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brazil), the Centre de Recerca Matemática (Spain), the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba (Argentina), the Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), among others.

His research work has been mainly focused on Ramsey theory, which could be understood as an evolving framework to study colorings (or partitions) of mathematical structures admitting interesting monochromatic substructures (that is, substructures contained in one single class of the partition, satisfying a desired property). Many phenomena arising in different contexts can be studied within this framework and that is why Ramsey theory has proven to be useful and very fruitful, with applications in several mathematical fields and other areas of science and technology. José has been specially interested in the theory of Ramsey spaces and its connections to set theory, combinatorics, topology, model theory and functional analysis. Following the works of Carlson-Simpson and Todorcevic, some of his research papers have contributed to define the abstract framework of this theory, introduce new examples and identify potential applications. Some of his ongoing and future projects include applications of the theory of Ramsey spaces to the geometry of Banach spaces, connections of Ramsey theory with the algebra of the Stone-Cech compactification of the natural numbers, and a study of the relation between Ramsey spaces, random structures, automorphism groups and constraint satisfaction computational problems.