Carlos Allende Prieto obtained his degree (1994) and PhD (1998) in Physics from the University of La Laguna in Spain. He was the W. J. McDonald postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin between 1998 and 2000, and after a second postdoc became Research Scientist at the same institution, where he remained until 2008. He was Gaia Data Flow Scientist at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College London in 2008 and 2009, when he became a Research Scientist at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). He is Research Professor at the IAC and Scientific Lead of the IT services of the IAC since 2018, and the Principal Investigator of the Medical Technology Program at IACTEC since 2023.

His research is focused in solar and stellar spectroscopy, with applications to the formation and evolution of the Milky Way, and the origin of the chemical elements. He has published 381 papers in peer-reviewed journals, which have received over 59,000 citations (h = 104). His 8 most-cited first-author papers have jointly received over 2,700 citations. His highest impact works are on the solar chemical composition and surveys of stars in the solar neighborhood. He developed the source deblending algorithm for the Radial Velocity Spectrograph onboard Gaia.

Carlos is the main developer of FERRE, a public FORTRAN2003/OpenMP scientific application (github.com/callendeprieto), with more than 10,000 lines of source code, to infer physical information from stellar spectra or photometry. FERRE is at the core of the automated chemical analysis pipelines for APOGEE, DESI and WEAVE. Carlos is the sole developer of Kiko>, an open-source job scheduler for shared-memory computers, and leads the development of Synple, a python wrapper for the spectral synthesis code Synspec. He coordinates the SMACK talks on astro computing and, with Daniela Korcakova and Katia Cunha, the IAU Commission G5 Talks.

Carlos was the Lead Scientist for the SDSS at the IAC (2010-2021), Coordinator of the Science Working Group on Stars and Stellar Populations for HIRES/E-ELT (now co-chair of the Stellar Working Group in ANDES), and a member of the ESPRESSO/VLT Science Team. He is a DESI Builder, and the Project Scientist for the HORuS spectrograph on the 10.4m GTC Telescope.

He acts or has acted as advisor for 4 Master students, 8 PhD students, 14 postdoctoral fellows, and a long list of undergraduate and master students. Has given over 50 invited talks and lectures around the world, and advised science funding agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Australia, Lithuania, and Argentina. He was scientific consultant for outreach publications by the University of Texas and the radio program Stardate.