Ricardo A. Fonseca was born in Lisbon, Portugal on September 11th, 1973. He received his degree in Physics Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 1996 and joined the Laser and Plasma Group at this institute. In 2000 he spent one year at the University of California Los Angeles working on the numerical modeling of high-intensity laser-plasma interactions. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the Technical University of Lisbon in 2002, on the subject of Laser-Plasma Electron Accelerators. He has published over one hundred papers in leading international scientific journals, that have been cited over 6000 times. In 2003 he took up a permanent position at ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa. From September 2013 to November 2018 he was the dean for technology at this institute, and he is currently a full professor of physics and electromagnetism.