From 1976-2015 He has been teaching physics in different universities in Cuba (1976-85), Spain (1985-1994) and USA (1994-20015). His areas of research are optics: In 1995, after accumulating 20 years of university teaching experience in the area of Physics and Optics, Dr. Varela joined the St. Thomas University faculty. Since 2002 he has been a vital part of the University’s “Green” initiative and has created and maintained the Solar Station along with various educational programs in Renewable Energy and Sustainability. Currently, his research is the development of holographic optical elements to be used as solar concentrators, solar energy, photovoltaic systems and hydrogen technologies.

Changyuan Yu, Michael R. Wang, Xu G. Huang, Alberto J. Varela. Efficient pseudonondiffracting beam shaping using a quasicontinuous phase-diffractive element. Optical Engineering, Vol. 40(04), 517-524 (April 2001) Changyuan Yu, Michael Wang, Alberto J. Varela, Bing Chen. High- density non-diffractive bean array for optical interconnection. Optics Communications 177 (2000) 369-376 (15 April 2000) A.J.Varela, M.L. Calvo. Approximate methods to determine the MTF of a hololenses' system: a comparative study. Opt. Eng. 34(4), 1116-1121 (April 1995). A.J.Varela, E.Bernabeu and J.L.Escudero, "Spatial Filtering by Holographic Optical Elements," Opt.Eng.33 (3), 991994 (March 1994). A.J.Varela, G.D.Boreman. "Scanned fringe, spatial harmonic distortion test for detector nonlinearity." Opt.Eng. 33(3),721 724 (March1994).