Luís Ducla Soares was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1973. In 1996, he graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Instituto Superior Técnico with a final average of 17 (out of 20). Besides being the best ECE student of 1996, he also received the Alcatel - Prof. Carvalho Fernandes award for the best student in the branch of Telecommunications and Electronics. In 2004, he received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering also from Instituto Superior Técnico. In 2020, he received his Habilitation Degree in Information Sciences and Technologies from the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL).

In 2000, he joined the faculty of the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), where he is currently Associate Professor (with Habilitation), having taught until today several subjects in the area of multimedia, signal processing, telecommunications and other related areas. In terms of supervision, he has participated in the successful supervision of 2 PhD Theses and 14 MSc Dissertations, with one of the PhD Theses having received the IBM Scientific Award in 2016. He currently has 2 more PhD Theses in progress.
Besides the teaching activity, he has also played an active role in university management, having already held important positions such as Director of the Engineering Degree in Telecommunications and Computer Engineering, Director of the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies and Member of the General Council of the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL).

In terms of scientific activity, most of his work has been developed at the Multimedia Signal Processing Group (MSP-Lx) of the Instituto de Telecomunicações, where he is currently Senior Researcher. Since 2021, he is the MSP-Lx Group Coordinator. His main areas of scientific work have been image and video processing and coding, including new modalities such as light field-based imaging. More recently, he has become interested in the application of image/video processing techniques to biometric recognition systems and biomedical analysis systems. To date, he has published 22 papers in internationally recognized journals, 6 chapters in books from international publishers, 51 papers in international conference proceedings and 11 papers in national conference proceedings.

Still in the context of his scientific activity, he has also had a very active participation in the work of the ISO/MPEG standardization committee during the development phase of the MPEG-4 visual standard, namely in the part related to error resilience. Furthermore, over the last few years, he actively participated in a total of 14 funded projects (7 European and 7 national), and was Principal Investigator of two national projects.

In parallel with this activity, he served as reviewer for several IEEE, IET and EURASIP journals and conferences. He also participated in the organization of several conferences and special sessions in international conferences, having been the general co-chairman of the International Workshop on Forensics and Biometrics (IWBF) held in Lisbon in March 2013. In addition, he was one of the local representatives of EURASIP, with the role of organizing and coordinating activities at the national level (Local Liaison Officer from 2009 to 2017 and National Representative from 2017 to 2019). In addition, he was also the Chairman of Technical Committee 120, responsible for recommending to the Sector Standardization Body the vote of Portugal regarding ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 standards related to image, audio and multimedia information coding, from 2009 to 2017. Since 2018, he is Associate Editor of the international journal Signal Processing (Q1 in the Web of Science and Scimago databases).