Alex Mira obtained an honour distinction for his BSc in Biology at the University of Alicante, Spain, in 1994. He then obtained a British Council scholarship to do a Master of Science degree at Oxford University (UK), and was the first Spanish student to be awarded a Rhodes scholarship, which allowed him to do his doctorate at Oxford on bacterial genetics and evolution, which he finished in 1999. Afterwards, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to carry out his post-doctoral research in the USA in the field of bacterial genomics for 2 and a half years, and a second post-doc at Uppsala University (Sweden) working on microarray technology and bioinformatics. After 9 years abroad, he returned to Spain with the Ramón y Cajal repatriation program in 2003 and initiated his own research group working on the genomics and metagenomics of oral bacteria. In 2009, he was awarded the "Jaime Ferran'' National Award for Research in Microbiology, the Biomedal Award in 2012, the UPSANA Research Award in 2016, the FIPSE National Award for Health Innovation in 2018, and the Juan José Suárez Gimeno Award for Promotion of Oral Health in 2019.

He is currently the principal investigator of the Oral Microbiome Laboratory at the FISABIO Foundation inSpain, where he has applied metagenomics and next-generation sequencing technology to the study of dental caries etiology, also discovering the presence of bacteria which prevent the formation of cavities, as well as to the study of bacteria from breast milk, saliva, human tumors, stomach, and the respiratory tract.

He has been the coordinator of the Spanish Network for Bacterial Genomics since it was created in 2004 until 2012 and of the Spanish Network for Oral Microbiology since it was created in 2014. He is the principal investigator in several publicly funded projects to study the bacterial communities inhabiting the oral cavity of healthy and diseased individuals. He is the inventor of a patent for the use of the new species Streptococcus dentisani as a probiotic against tooth decay, another two patents of diagnostic tests for cancer and tooth decay, currently under validation, another on the use of nitrate prebiotics to promote oral and cardiovascular health, and a recently registered one on a new anti-viral peptide of human origin against the flu. He has also developed a real-time method to measure antibiotic resistance in biofilm infections, which is currently being evaluated to be used in routine clinical practice at hospitals and dentistry clinics. 

Dr. Mira is author of over 100 publications in international journals, including Nature, Trends in Genetics, Nature Reviews in Microbiology, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Trends in Microbiology or American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, among others (H-index: 50). He is associate editor of the journals Frontiers in Microbiology andMicrobial Ecology. He has participated as invited lecturer in different international courses of DNA sequence analysis and bioinformatics, organized by the University of Valencia, the FISABIO Summer School, and the University of the United Nations.