At the end of 1992 Manuel moved to the UCM thanks to a special
chair programme (acronym in Spanish, PROPIO) set-up by the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science, quite in the spirit of the Royal Society
chairs, giving complete freedom to the chair holder. Manuel was a
cofounder of the Instituto Pluridisciplinar (IP-UCM), a research center
where he served twice as a Director.
As a follow-up of his previouswork, and based on theory and experiments
carried out in his laboratory at the IP-UCM, he provided quite a
lot of results on hydrodynamic instabilities, withemphasis on interfacial
phenomena. He dealt with the problems of patterned convection and
the evolution of defects, the onset and growth of interfacial solitary
waves and solitons, interfacial instabilities with parametric excitation,
coupled or not to theMarangoni effect, in single and layered structures,
the self-propulsion of active drops due to instability triggered by the
Marangoni effect, the aspects of wetting and spreading dynamics, and
the evolution of falling liquid films