Dr. Morales is a chemical and systems engineer (1984) with a master's degree in chemical engineering (1986) and in control engineering (1992) from the Tecnológico de Monterrey (México). He obtained a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence while staying at the Computational Intelligence Laboratory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (2003). Dr. Morales co-founded the Industrial Automation Center (1987) at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. He was awarded the Prize for Teaching and Research (1993 and 2005).

As a consultant specializing in analyzing and designing control systems, he carried out projects with more than 20 national and international companies. He was classified as a consultant and extensionist full professor (1998). He has worked at the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), organizing the IFAC-CEA (2007) congress and the IFAC-SAFEPROCESS (2012) symposium. Through international research projects, he has advised doctoral theses at the Institute of Industrial Automation (Spain) and the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (Gipsa-Lab, France). He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Sectoral Fund for Research and Development in Naval Sciences (2010-2020). The Mexican System of Researchers accredits his scientific production as Level 2 (2014). He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (2015) and the Mexican Academy of Engineering (2016). He was Associate Research Director (2007) and Academic Vice-Director (2009).

He is the National Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Engineering and Sciences (2014) at Tecnológico de Monterrey.