Professor José Héctor Morales Bárcenas is originally from Mexico City, where he received public education up to the bachelor's degree. He studied Physics at the Faculty of Sciences of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Subsequently, he obtained a partial scholarship for studies abroad from Conacyt and obtained a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), in New Jersey, USA. He also continued partially with the support of Conacyt, complemented with the support of the U.S. Government, to obtain his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2008 at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in New York, USA.

His Doctorate thesis was done under the supervision of Dr. Margaret Cheney at the "Center for Inverse Problems" (IPRPI) of RPI. The contribution of the work consisted in extending the results of tomographic imaging using synthetic aperture radar to a statistical inversion scheme.

In 2009 he joined the Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT) in Guanajuato as a research associate through a Conacyt repatriation grant. His research work has focused on posing and solving inverse problems in seismology and medical physics mainly and extending the results to Bayesian inference schemes. Currently, he is a professor, with indefinite tenure, in the Department of Mathematics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM).