Izquierdo Peña obtained his degree in anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1997[1] and published his thesis titled Prospección arqueoastronómica en la cultura de San Agustín ("Archeoastronomical prospection in the San Agustín culture") in 1998.[2]
In 2008 he published his MSc. thesis at the Université de Montréal titled The Muisca Calendar: An approximation to the timekeeping system of the ancient native people of the northeastern Andes of Colombia in which he analyzed the Muisca calendar, a complex lunisolar calendar used by the Muisca of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense.[3][4] In this publication and later work[5] Izquierdo Peña analyzed the work by Muisca scholarsJosé Domingo Duquesne, Alexander von Humboldt, Vicente Restrepo and Pedro Simón on the Muisca calendar. He also described the Choachí Stone, a rock art pice found in the village of Choachí in the 1940s that functioned as a calculator for the use of the complex calendar.[6][7]