José Edelstein was born in Buenos Aires. He studied physics at the Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche and at the Universidad de la Plata where he received his PhD in 1996. His dissertation dealt with topological aspects of supergravity and was conducted under the supervision of Fidel Schaposnik. He has been postdoctoral fellow in Santiago de Compostela (1997-2000) and Harvard (2000-2001). During the year 2002 he joined the Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa as an invited researcher. Currently he is a CONICET researcher at the Universidad de La Plata. In May 2003 he joined CECS as adjunct professor. He is currently working in string theory, and nonperturbative phenomena in supersymmetric gauge theories. His research interests include Supergravity duals of gauge theories, cosmological scenarios in string theory, S-branes and D-branes, non-perturbative methods in supersymmetric gauge theories and integrable systems, and topological field theories.