Joaquin Azpiroz-Leehan was born in Mexico City. He obtained his Engineering and Master's degrees in Biomedical Engineering from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.  He received his Ph.D. degree from Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France in 1992.  Since 1983 he has been with Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, where he was Head of the Electrical Engineering Department from 1993 to 1997, and where he is presently Professor of Biomedical Engineering. He has lectured in over 100 courses, mostly on image processing, computer architecture, and medical applications and interfacing of microprocessors and microcomputers. He has been a member of the Mexican Society of Biomedical Engineering (Sociedad Mexicana de Ingeniería Biomédica) and of IEEE-EMBS for over 10 years.

He has co-written two books, one on Medical Imaging and another one on Image Processing. He has been Associate Editor of the Mexican Journal of Biomedical Engineering (Revista Mexicana de Ingeniería Biomédica) and is presently an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. He was also the representative of Region 9 (Latin America) at the Engineering in Medicine and Biology’s Administrative Committee (1999-2005), and Technical Program Chair at the 25^th EMBC (Cancun 2003). His main research interests are Biomedical image processing, image compression and medical applications of digital signal processors.