Cristobal completed his undergraduate studies in astronomy at Universidad Catolica in Chile, where he did his thesis work on neutron stars. After this, he moved to Princeton University for his PhD, where he has worked in various different projects related to planet formation and evolution. In particular, he tried to understand how the planets interact gravitationally with their birth protoplanetary disks and also what the fine structure around orbital resonances observed in the Kepler multi-planet systems can tell us about planet migration. For his thesis, he has been mostly working on theories of planet migration and trying to account for the population of close-in gas giant planets — the so-called hot Jupiters. He has found that the long-term and weak gravitational interactions between planets tend to reproduce many of observed orbital properties of the hot Jupiters.

He will defend his thesis on 20 August 2015 and take up the TGF award to CITA (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics) and the Center for Planetary Science at the University of Toronto, where exoplanets is a very active research field. He plans to extend some of the theories of planet migration by taking into account the effect of stellar evolution and hopes to understand how the architecture of planetary systems changes for different stellar populations.