Manuel López-Ibáñez is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Alliance Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization and Associate Editor of the Evolutionary Computation journal, member of the IEEE Task Force on Automated Algorithm Design, Configuration and Selection, an elected member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Board and the Business Committee of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO).

Dr López-Ibáñez research is about optimization methods for tackling real-world problems, particularly those arising in business, logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, engineering, among others. His research includes both continuous, combinatorial and black-box problems, with single and multiple objectives, and problems that require interaction with a human decision-maker. He has made significant contributions to the automatic selection, configuration and design of algorithms, a topic that encompasses AutoML. He is the main author of the widely-used irace software (https://mlopez-ibanez.github.io/irace/).