Ricardo A. Fonseca was born in Lisbon, Portugal on September 11th, 1973. 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, 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.