Professor Francisco Javier Zaragoza Martínez is an Electronics Engineer from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Azcapotzalco Campus (1994); he holds a Master's degree in Engineering from the Computer Science Section of Cinvestav (1997) and a Ph.D. in Optimization and Combinatorics from the University of Waterloo (2004). He has been a member of the National System of Researchers since 2005 and Professor with Deseable Profile Prodep since 2004. Since 2016, he is an elected member of the Mexican Academy of Computing and member of the Mexican Society of Operations Research.

He was a Professor of Assignment in the Department of Mathematics at the Higher School of Physics and Mathematics of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) 1993-1997, and since 2004 he is Professor in the Department of Systems at UAM Azcapotzalco Campus. There he has been Coordinator of the Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering (2009-2013) and a member of the basic core and the study committee of the Postgraduate Program in Optimization founded in 2012. Together with three of his graduate students, he won in 2015 the Discrete Optimization Challenge proposed by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg as part of the Open Research Challenge. From 2018 to 2020 he was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Mathematics of that German university, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

He has published at least 20 articles in indexed journals (JCR, SJR, ZBMATH, Latindex) and at least 30 in refereed conference proceedings. He has graduated two Ph.D. students, ten M.Sc. students, and more than 40 undergraduate students. He has been an invited lecturer by the Mexican Academy of Energy, the Mexican Academy of Engineering, the British Council, the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society, the American Mathematical Society, the Canadian Mathematical Society, the Mexican Mathematical Society, and multiple universities and research centers.

He represented Mexico twice in the International Mathematical Olympiad (1988 and 1989) and in the Ibero-American Mathematical Olympiad (1989). He has been responsible on several occasions for the Mexican teams participating in the International Informatics Olympiad (1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2004, 2005, and 2007). He was the founding president of the Mexican Informatics Olympiad (1996) and of the Iberoamerican Correspondence Informatics Competition (1998). He participated in the organization of the International Mathematics Olympiad (2005) and the International Informatics Olympiad (2006), both held in Mexico. Since 2004 he has organized the UAM Programming Contest.