Manuel is ICIJ's first Neo4j Data Fellow and joined the Paradise Papers project in 2017.

Originally from Mexico, Manuel was awarded a scholarship from Japan’s Ministry of Education shortly finishing his undergraduate studies and moved to the country of the rising sun, where he would spend six years. He worked as a trader and later as a market risk manager at J.P. Morgan for 11 years (And 5 months. And 3 days.) He transferred to New York in 2007, literally landing in the country along with the financial crisis.

Manuel entered the Master’s program at Columbia University’s School of Journalism in 2016, where he was a fellow of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. He used Neo4j –the technology used by the ICIJ to organize the Panama Papers vast document leak– in his investigations at Columbia, which he presented at GraphConnect Europe, in London.

Manuel joined The Marshall Project as a data journalism fellow during the summer of 2017, where he published stories on mental health in prison and mass incarceration.