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L. J. Garcia is a leading figure in the search for habitable exoplanets, specializing in the detection and characterization of temperate Earth-sized worlds orbiting ultracool dwarf stars. As a key member of the SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) project, Garcia has made foundational contributions to the design, deployment, and scientific strategy of this groundbreaking ground-based transit survey. Garcia’s work has been instrumental in establishing the SPECULOOS-South observatory at ESO Paranal, Chile, and the SPECULOOS Northern Observatory, a network of six identical 1-meter robotic telescopes dedicated to finding planets around the smallest and coolest stars—those most amenable to atmospheric study with the James Webb Space Telescope. Their most-cited paper, "SPECULOOS: Ultracool dwarf transit survey" (2020, 105 citations), outlines the project’s core motivation and methodology, while subsequent publications detail the observatories’ performance, target lists, and five-year survey results. Through these efforts, Garcia has helped define a new frontier in exoplanet science, enabling the discovery of potentially habitable planets that can be characterized in unprecedented detail.